CORNELL 
 
 UNIVERSITY 
 
 LIBRARY 
 
 FROM 
 
Cornell University Library 
 PR6037.T31H51920 
 
 Here are ladies. 
 
 3 1924 013 226 034 
 
Cornell University 
 Library 
 
 The original of tliis book is in 
 tine Cornell University Library. 
 
 There are no known copyright restrictions in 
 the United States on the use of the text. 
 
 http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924013226034 
 
HERE ARE LADIES 
 
THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 
 
 NEW VORE • BOSTON ■ CHICAGO 
 DALLAS • ATLANTA • SAM FRANCISCO 
 
 MACMILLAN Sc CO., Limited 
 
 LONDON • BOMBAY • CALCOTTA 
 MELBOUKNB 
 
 THE MACMILLAN CO. OP CANADA, Ltd. 
 
 TOKONTO 
 
HERE ARE LADIES 
 
 BY 
 
 JAMES STEPHENS 
 
 AUTHOR Of * TOE CROCK 07 GOU> * 
 
 THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 
 1920 
 
— p 1? 
 
 T3I H ^ 
 
 Ajxfi^ 
 
 ■t/A'O 
 
 Copyright, ion 
 THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 
 
 Set up and electrotyped. Published October, 1913 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 PAGE 
 
 Women i 
 
 Three Heavy Husbands 5 
 
 A Glass of Beer 33 
 
 One and One 47 
 
 Three Women Who Wept 51 
 
 The Triangle JJ 
 
 The Daisies 91 
 
 Three Angry People 93 
 
 The Threepenny Piece 121 
 
 Brigid 141 
 
 Three Young Wives 143 
 
 The Horses 169 
 
 Mistress Quiet Eyes 185 
 
 Three Lovers Who Lost 189 
 
 The Blind Man 235 
 
 Sweet-Apple 251 
 
 Three Happy Places 253 
 
 The Moon 273 
 
 There is a Tavern in the Town .... 275 
 
HERE ARE LADIES 
 
WOMEN 
 
 Listen! If but women were 
 Half as kind as they are fair 
 There would be an end to all 
 Miseries that do appal. 
 
 Cloud and wind would fly together 
 
 In a dance of sunny weather, 
 And the happy trees would throw 
 Gifts to travellers below. 
 
 Then the lion, meek and mild. 
 With the lamb would, side by side. 
 Couch him friendly, and would be 
 Innocent of enmity. 
 
 Then the Frozen Pole would go, 
 Shaking off his fields of snow, 
 To a kinder clime and dance 
 Warmly with the girls of France. 
 
 These ; if women only were 
 Half as kind as they are fair. 
 
THREE HEAVY HUSBANDS 
 
THREE HEAVY HUSBANDS 
 
 Hs had a high nose. He looked at one over 
 the collar, so to speak. His regard was very 
 assured, and his speech was that short bundle 
 of monosyllables which the subaltern throws 
 at the orderly. He had never been ques- 
 tioned, and, the precedent being absent, he 
 had never questioned himself. Why should 
 he? We live by question and answer, but 
 we do not know the reply to anything until 
 a puzzled comrade bothers us and initiates 
 that divine curiosity which both humbles and 
 uplifts us. 
 
 He wanted all things for himself. What 
 he owned he wished to own completely. He 
 would give anything away with the largest 
 generosity, but he would share with no one — 
 
 "Whatever is mine," said he, "must be 
 entirely mine. If it is alive I claim its duty 
 to the last respiration of its breath, and if it 
 
 5 
 
6 HERE ARE LADIES 
 
 is dead I cannot permit a mortgage on it. 
 Have you a claim on anything belonging to 
 me? then you may have it entirely, I must 
 have all of it or none." 
 
 He was a stockbroker, and, by the methods 
 peculiar to that mysterious profession, he 
 had captured a sufficiency of money to enable 
 him to regard the future with calmness and 
 his fellow-creatures with condescension — 
 perhaps the happiest state to which a certain 
 humanity can attain. 
 
 So far matters were in order. There 
 remained nothing to round his life into the 
 complete, harmonious circle except a wife; 
 but as a stated income has the choice of a 
 large supply, he shortly discovered a lady 
 whose qualifications were such as would or- 
 nament any, however exalted, position — She 
 was sound in wind and limb. She spoke 
 grammar with the utmost precision, and she 
 could play the piano with such skill that it 
 was difficult to explain why she played it 
 badly. 
 
 This also was satisfactory, and if the 
 world had been made of machinery he would 
 have had the fee-simple of happiness. But 
 to both happiness and misery there follows 
 the inevitable second act, and beyond that. 
 
THREE HEAVY HUSBANDS 7 
 
 and to infinity, action and interaction, involu- 
 tion and evolution, forging change for ever. 
 Thus he failed to take into consideration that 
 the lady was alive, that she had a head on her 
 shoulders which was native to her body, and 
 that she could not be aggregated as chattel 
 property for any longer period than she 
 agreed to. 
 
 After their marriage he discovered that 
 she had dislikes which did not always coin- 
 cide with his, and appreciations which set his 
 teeth on edge. A wife in the house is a critic 
 on the hearth — this truth was daily and un- 
 pleasantly impressed upon him: but, of 
 course, every man knows that every woman 
 is a fool, and a tolerant smile is the only 
 recognition we allow to their whims. God 
 made them as they are — ^we grin, and 
 bear it. 
 
 His wife found that the gospel of her 
 husband was this — Love me to the exclusion 
 of all human creatures. Believe in me even 
 when I am in the wrong. Women should be 
 seen and not heard. When you want excite- 
 ment make a fuss of your husband. — But 
 while he entirely forgot that his wife had 
 been bought and paid for, she did not forget 
 it: indeed, she could not help remember- 
 
8 HERE ARE LADIES 
 
 ing it. A wrong had been done her not to 
 be obscured even by economics, the great 
 obscurer. She had been won and not wooed. 
 (The very beasts have their privileges !) She 
 had been defrauded of how many teasing and 
 provoking prerogatives, aloofnesses, and sur- 
 renders, and her body, if not her mind, re- 
 sented and remembered it. 
 
 There are times when calmness is not 
 recognised as a virtue. Of course, he had 
 wooed her in a way. He took her to the 
 opera, he gave her jewels, he went to Church 
 with her twice every Sunday, and once a 
 month he knelt beside her in more profound 
 reverences : sometimes he petted her, always 
 he was polite — 
 
 But he had not told her that her eyes were 
 the most wonderful and inspiring orbs into 
 which a tired man could look. He never 
 said that there would not be much to choose 
 between good and evil if he lost her. He 
 never said that one touch of her lips would 
 electrify a paralytic into an acrobat. He 
 never swore that he would commit suicide 
 and dive to deep perdition if she threw him 
 over — none of these things. It is possible 
 that she did not wish him to say or do such 
 extravagances, but he had not played the 
 
THREE HEAVY HUSBANDS 9 
 
 game, and, knowing that something was 
 badly wrong, she nursed a grievance, that 
 horrid fosterling. 
 
 He was fiercely jealous, not of his love, 
 but of his property, and while he was de- 
 lighted to observe that other men approved 
 of his taste, he could not bear that his wife 
 should admire these outsiders. This was his 
 attitude to her: Give me your admirations, 
 all of them, every note of exclamation of 
 which you are mistress, every jot and tit- 
 tle of your thoughts must be mine, for, 
 lacking these, I have nothing. I am good 
 to you. I have interposed between you 
 and the buffets of existence. I temper all 
 winds to the bloom of your cheek. Do you 
 your part, and so we will be happy. 
 
 There was a clerk in his office, a black- 
 haired, slim, frowning young man, who 
 could talk like a cascade for ten minutes and 
 be silent for a month : he was a very angry 
 young man, with many hatreds and many 
 ambitions. His employer prized him as a 
 reliable and capable worker, liked his man- 
 ners, and paid him thirty-five shillings per 
 week — Outside of these matters the young 
 man abode no more in his remembrance than 
 
lo HERE ARE LADIES 
 
 did the flower on the heath or the bird on the 
 tree. 
 
 It happened one day that the employer fell 
 sick of influenza and was confined to his bed. 
 This clerk, by order, waited on him to see 
 to his correspondence; for, no matter who 
 sneezes, work must be attended to. 
 
 The young man stayed in the house for a 
 week, and during his sojourn there he met 
 the lady. She fair, young, brooding! he 
 also young, silent, and angry! After the 
 first look had passed between them, there 
 was little more to be said. They came to- 
 gether as though they had been magnetised. 
 Love or passion, by whatever name it is 
 called, was born abruptly. There is a force 
 in human relations drawing too imperatively 
 for denial; defying self-interest, and drag- 
 ging at all anchors of duty and religion. Is 
 it in man only the satisfaction of self? Ego- 
 lism standing like a mountain, and demand- 
 ing, "Give me yourself or I will kill myself." 
 And women! is their love the degradation 
 of self, the surrender and very abasement of 
 lowliness? or is it also egotism set on a 
 pinnacle, so careless and self-assured as to be 
 fearful of nothing? In their eyes the third 
 
THREE HEAVY HUSBANDS n 
 
 person, a shadow already, counted as less 
 than a shadow. He was a name with no 
 significance, a something without a locality. 
 His certain and particular income per annum 
 was a thing to laugh at . . . there was a 
 liot, a swift voice speaking — "I love you," 
 it said, "I love you": he would batter his 
 way into heaven, he would tear delight from 
 wherever delight might be — or else, and this 
 was harder, a trembling man pleading, "Aid 
 me or I perish," and it is woman's instinct 
 not to let a man perish. "If I help you, I 
 hurt myself," she sighed; and, "Hurt your- 
 self, then," sighed the man; "would you 
 have me perish. . . ?" 
 
 So the owner by purchase smiled — 
 "You are mine," said he, "altogether mine, 
 no one else has a lien upon you. When the 
 weather is fine I will take you for drives in 
 the sunshine. In the nights we will go to the 
 opera, hearkening together to the tenor tell- 
 ing his sweet romanza, and when the wintry 
 rain beats on the windows you will play 
 the piano for me, and so we will be happy." 
 
 When he was quite recovered he went back 
 to his office, and found that one of his clerks 
 
12 HERE ARE LADIES 
 
 had not arrived — this angered him; when 
 he returned home again in the evening, he 
 found that his wife was not there. So 
 things go. 
 
II 
 
 He was one of those who shy at the tete-a- 
 tete life which, for a long time, matrimony 
 demands. As his wedding-day approached 
 he grew fearful of the prolonged conversa- 
 tion which would stretch from the day of 
 marriage, down the interminable vistas, to 
 his death, and, more and more, he became 
 doubtful of his ability to cope with, or his 
 endurance to withstand, the extraordinary 
 debate called marriage. 
 
 He was naturally a silent man. He did 
 not dislike conversation if it was kept within 
 decent limits : indeed, he responded to it con- 
 tentedly enough, but when he had spoken 
 or been addressed for more than an hour he 
 became, first, impatient, then bored, and, 
 finally, sulky or ill-mannered. — "With men," 
 said he, "one can talk or be silent as one 
 wishes, for between them there is a com- 
 munity of understanding which turns the oc- 
 casional silence into a pregnant and fruitful 
 
 J3 
 
14 HERE ARE LADIES 
 
 interlude wherein a thought may keep itself 
 warm until it is wanted : but with a woman !" 
 — he could not pursue that speculation fur- 
 ther, for his acquaintance with the sex was 
 limited. 
 
 In every other respect his bride was a 
 happiness. Her good looks soothed and 
 pleased him. The touch of her hand gave 
 him an extraordinary pleasure which con- 
 cealed within it a yet more extraordinary ex- 
 citement. Her voice, as a mere sound, en- 
 chanted him. It rippled and flowed, deep- 
 ened and tinkled. It cooed and sang to him 
 at times like the soft ringdove calling to its 
 mate, and, at times again, it gurgled and 
 piped like a thrush happy in the sunlight. 
 The infinite variation of her tone astonished 
 and delighted him, and if it could have re- 
 mained something as dexterous and imper- 
 sonal as a wind he would have been content 
 to listen to it for ever — but, could he give 
 her pipe for pipe? Would the rich gurgle 
 or the soft coo sound at last as a horrid 
 iteration, a mere clamour to which he must 
 not only give an obedient heed, but must even 
 answer from a head wherein silence had so 
 peacefully brooded? 
 
 His mind was severe, his utterance stac- 
 
THREE HEAVY HUSBANDS 15 
 
 cato, and he had no knowledge of those con- 
 versational arts whereby nouns and verbs are 
 amazingly transfigured into a gracious frolic 
 or an intellectual pleasure. To snatch the 
 chatter from its holder, toss and keep it 
 playing in the air until another snatched it 
 from him; to pluck a theory hot from the 
 stating, and expand it until it was as irides- 
 cent and, perhaps, as thin as a soap-bubble : 
 to light up and vivify a weighty conversa- 
 tion until the majestic thing sparkled and 
 glanced like a jewel — these things he could 
 not do, and he knew it. Many a time he 
 had sat, amazed as at an exhibition of acro- 
 batics, while around him the chatter burst 
 and sang and shone. He had tried to bear 
 his part, but had never been able to edge 
 more than one word into that tossing cat- 
 aract, and so he fell to the habit of listening 
 instead of speaking. 
 
 With some reservations, he enjoyed listen- 
 ing, but particularly he enjoyed listening 
 to his own thoughts as they trod slowly, but 
 <rery certainly, to foregone conclusions. Into 
 the silent arena of his mind no impertinent 
 chatter could burst with a mouthful of puns 
 or ridicule, or a reminiscence caught on the 
 wing and hurled apropos to the very centre 
 
1 6 HERE ARE LADIES 
 
 of discussion. His own means of conveying 
 or gathering information was that whereby- 
 one person asked a question and another per- 
 son answered it, and, if the subject proved 
 deeper than the assembled profundity, then 
 one pulled out the proper volume of an en- 
 cyclopaedia, and the pearl was elicited as with 
 a pin. 
 
 Meanwhile, his perturbation was real. 
 There are people to whom we need not talk 
 — let them pass: we overlook or smile dis- 
 tantly at the wretches, retaining our reputa- 
 tion abroad and our self-respect in its sanc- 
 tuary: but there are others with whom we 
 may not be silent, and into this latter cate- 
 gory a wife enters with assured emphasis. 
 He foresaw endless opportunities for that 
 familiar discussion to which he was a 
 stranger. There were breakfast-tables, din- 
 ner-tables, tea-tables, and, between these, 
 there might be introduced those preposterous 
 other tables which women invent for no 
 purpose unless it be that of making talk. 
 His own breakfast, dinner, and tea-tables 
 had been solitary ones, whereat he lounged 
 with a newspaper propped against a lamp, 
 or a book resting one end against the sugar- 
 bowl and the other against his plate. — This 
 
THREE HEAVY HUSBANDS 17 
 
 quietude would be ravaged from him for 
 ever, and that tumult nothing could exorcise 
 or impede. Further than these, he foresaw 
 an interminable drawing-room, long walks 
 together, and other, even more confidential 
 and particular, sequestrations. 
 
 After one has married a lady, what does 
 one say to her? He could not conceive any 
 one saying anything beyond "Good-morn- 
 ing." Then the other aspect arrested him, 
 "What does a woman find to say to a man?" 
 Perhaps safety lay in this direction, for they 
 were reputed notable and tireless speakers 
 to whom replies are not pressingly necessary. 
 He looked upon his sweetheart as from a dis- 
 tance, and tried to reconstruct her recent con- 
 versations. — He was amazed at the little he 
 could remember. "I, I, I, we, we, we, this 
 shop, that shop, Aunt Elsa, and chocolates." 
 She had mentioned all these things on the 
 previous day, but she did not seem to have 
 said anything memorable about them, and, 
 so far as he could recollect, he had said noth- 
 ing in reply but "Oh, yes" and "To be sure !" 
 Could he sustain a lifetime of small-talk on 
 these meagre responses? He saw in vision 
 his most miserable tea-table — a timid hus- 
 band and a mad wife glaring down their 
 
i8 HERE ARE LADIES 
 
 noses at plates. The picture leaped at him 
 as from a cinematograph and appalled him. 
 . . . After a time they would not even dare 
 to look at each other. Hatred would crouch 
 behind these figures, waiting for its chain 
 to be loosed ! 
 
 So he came to the knowledge that he, so 
 soon to be a husband, had been specially 
 fashioned by nature to be a bachelor. For 
 him safety lay in solitude : others, less rigor- 
 ously planned, might safely venture into the 
 haphazard, gregarious state of wedlock, but 
 he not only could not, but must not, do so, 
 and he meditated an appeal to his bride to 
 release him from the contract. Several times 
 the meditation almost became audible, but 
 always, just as he toppled on the surge of 
 speech, the dear lady loosed a torrent of ir- 
 relevancies which swirled him from all an- 
 chorage, and left him at the last stranded so 
 distantly from his thought that he did not 
 know how to find his way back to it. 
 
 It would be too brutally direct to shatter 
 information about silk at one shilling the 
 yard with a prayer for matrimonial freedom 
 The girl would be shocked — ^he could see het 
 — she would stare at him, and suddenly grow 
 red in the face and stammer ; and he would 
 
THREE HEAVY HUSBANDS 19 
 
 be forced to trail through a lengthy, precise 
 explanation of this matter which was not 
 at all precise to himself. Furthermore, cer- 
 tain obscure emotions rendered him unwill- 
 ing to be sundered from this girl. — There 
 was the touch of her hand; more, the touch 
 of her lips given bravely and with ready 
 modesty — a contact not lightly to be relin- 
 quished. He did not believe he could ever 
 weary of looking at her eyes : they were grej"^, 
 widely open, and of a kindness such as he 
 could not disbelieve in ; a radiant cordiality, 
 a soft, limpid goodwill ; believing and trust- 
 ful eyes whch held no guile When they looked 
 at him : there were her movements, her swift- 
 ness, spaciousness, her buoyant certainty: 
 one remembered her hair, her hands, the way 
 she wore a frock, and a strange, seductive 
 something about the look of her shoe. 
 
 The thing was not possible! It is the 
 last and darkest insult to tell the woman who 
 loves you that you do not wish to marry her. 
 Her indignant curiosity may be appeased 
 only by the excuse that you like some other 
 woman better, and although she may hate the 
 explanation she will understand it — but no 
 less legitimate excuse than this may pass 
 sunderingly between a man and a woman. 
 
20 HERE ARE LADIES 
 
 It lay, therefore, that he must amend his 
 own hand, and, accordingly, for the purpose 
 of marital intercourse, he began a sad inquiry 
 into the nature of things. The world was so 
 full of things : clouds and winds and sewing 
 machines, kings and brigands, hats and 
 heads, flower-pots, jam and public-houses — 
 surely one could find a little to chat about at 
 any moment if one were not ambitiously 
 particular. With inanimate objects one could 
 speak of shape and colour and usefulness. 
 Animate objects had, beside these, move- 
 ments and aptitudes for eating and drinking, 
 playing and quarrelling. Artistic things 
 were well or badly executed, and were 
 also capable of an inter-comparison which 
 could not but be interesting and lengthy. — 
 These things could all be talked about. Tiaere 
 were positive and negative qualities attach- 
 ing to everything, and when the former was 
 exhausted the latter could still be profitably 
 mined — "Order," said he, "subsists in 
 everything, and even conversation must be 
 subject to laws capable of ascertainment." 
 
 He carefully, and under the terms of bad- 
 inage, approached other men, inquiring how 
 they bore themselves in the matrimonial dis- 
 pute, and what were the subjects usually 
 
THREE HEAVY HUSBANDS 21 
 
 spoken of in the intimacies of family life. 
 But from these people he received the small- 
 est assistance. — Some were ribald, some jo- 
 cose, some so darkly explanatory that intel- 
 ligence could not peer through the mist or 
 could only divine that these hated their wives. 
 One man held that all domestic matters 
 should be left entirely to the wife and that 
 talking was a domestic matter. Another said 
 that the words "y^s, no, and why" would 
 safeguard a man through any labyrinth, 
 however tortuous. Another said that he al- 
 ways went out when the wife began to speak ; 
 and yet another suggested that the only 
 possible basis for conversation was that of 
 perpetual opposition, where an affirmation 
 was always countered by a denial, and the 
 proving of the case exercised both time and 
 intelligence. 
 
 As he sat in the train beside his wife the 
 silence which he so dreaded came upon them. 
 Emptiness buzzed in his head. He sought 
 diligently for something to speak about — the 
 characteristics of objects! There were ob- 
 jects and to spare, but he could not say — 
 "that window is square, it is made of glass," 
 or, "the roof of this carriage is flat, it is 
 made of wood." 
 
22 HERE ARE LADIES 
 
 Suddenly his wife buried her face in her 
 muff, and her shoulders were convulsed. . . . 
 
 Love and contrition possessed him on the 
 instant. He eased his husky throat, and the 
 dreaded, interminable conversation began — 
 
 "What are you crying for, my dear?" 
 said he. 
 
 Her voice, smothered by the fur, replied — 
 
 "I am not crying, darling," said she, "I 
 am only laughing." 
 
Ill 
 
 H^ got stifHy up from his seat before the 
 fire — 
 
 "Be hanged," said he, "if I wait any longer 
 for her. If she doesn't please to come in 
 before this hour let her stop out." He stared 
 into the fire for a few moments — "Let her 
 go to Jericho," said he, and he tramped up 
 to bed. 
 
 They had been married just six months, 
 after, as he put it, the hardest courtship a 
 man ever undertook. She was more like a 
 piece of quicksilver than a girl. She was as 
 uncertain as a spring wind, as flighty as a 
 ball of thistledown — "Doesn't know her own 
 mind for ten minutes together," he groaned. 
 "Hasn't any mind at all," he'd think an hour 
 later. While, on the following day, it might 
 be — "That woman is too deep, she is dodging 
 all round me, she is sticking her finger in my 
 eye. She treats me as if I wasn't there at 
 23 
 
24 HERE ARE LADIES 
 
 one moment, and diddles me as if I was Tom 
 Fool the next— I'll get out of it." 
 
 He had got out of it three or four times — 
 halted her against a wall, and, with a furious 
 forefinger, wagged all her misdeeds in her 
 face; then, rating her up, down and round, 
 he had prepared to march away complacent 
 and refreshed like Justice taking leave of a 
 sinner, only to find that if the jade wept 
 he could not go away — 
 
 "Dash it all," said he, "you can't leave a 
 girl squatting down against a wall, with her 
 head in her lap and she crying. Hang it," 
 said he, "you feel as if there was water round 
 your legs and you'll splash if you move." 
 
 So he leavened justice with mercy, and, 
 having dried her tears with his lips, he 
 found himself in the same position as before, 
 with a mad suspicion tattering through his 
 brain that maybe he had been "diddled" 
 again. 
 
 But he married her, and to do that was a 
 job also. She shied at matrimony. She 
 shied at everything that looked plain or 
 straight. She was like a young dog out for 
 a walk: when she met a side-street she 
 bolted down it and was instantly surrounded 
 by adventure and misery, returning, like 
 
THREE HEAVY HUSBANDS 25 
 
 the recovered pup, thick with the mud of 
 those excursions. There was a lust in her 
 blood for side-streets, laneways and corners. 
 
 "Marriage!" said she, and she was woe- 
 begone — "Marriage will be for ever." 
 
 "So will heaven," he retorted comfort- 
 ingly. 
 
 "So will — the other place," said she, with 
 a giggle, and crushed him under the feeling 
 that she envisaged him as the devil of that 
 particular Hades, instead of as an unfortu- 
 nate sinner plucked up by the heels and 
 soused into the stew-pan by his wife. 
 
 He addressed himself — 
 
 "When we are married," said he, "I'll 
 keep a hand on you, my lady, that you won't 
 be able to wriggle away from. If you are 
 slippery, and faith you are, why I'm tough, 
 and so you'll find it." "Get rid of your 
 kinks before you marry," said he. "I've no 
 use for a wife with one eye on me, and it a 
 dubious one, and the other one squinting into 
 a parlour two streets off. You've got to 
 settle down and quit tricks. A wife has no 
 one else to deceive but her husband, that's 
 all she can want tricks for, and there's not 
 going to be any in my house. It's all right 
 for a pretty girl to be a bit larky " 
 
26 HERE ARE LADIES 
 
 "Am I really pretty?" said she, deeply in- 
 terested and leaning forward with her hands 
 clasping her knees — "Do you really and truly 
 think I am pretty? I met a man one time, 
 he had a brown moustache and blue eyes, 
 outside a tailor's shop in Georges Street, with 
 a public-house on one side, and he said he 
 thought I was very pretty : he told me what 
 his name was, but I forget it: maybe, you 
 know him: he wears a tweed suit with a 
 stripe and a soft hat — Let me see, no, his 
 name began with a T " 
 
 "His name was Thief," he roared, "and 
 that was his profession too. Don't let me 
 catch you talking with a strange man, or 
 you'll get hurt, and his brown eyes will be 
 mixed up with his blue moustache." 
 
 So married they were, six months now, 
 and the wits were nearly worried out of him 
 in trying to keep pace with his wife's vaga- 
 ries. Matrimony had not cured her love for 
 side-streets, short cuts and chance acquaint- 
 ances, and she was gradually making her 
 husband travel at a similar tangent. When 
 they started to go to church he would find, 
 to his amazement, that they were in the 
 Museum. If they journeyed with a Museum 
 for an objective they were certain to pull 
 
THREE HEAVY HUSBANDS 27 
 
 up in the Botanic Gardens. A call on a 
 friend usually turned into a visit to a thea- 
 tre or a walk by the Dodder — 
 
 "Heart-scalded I am," said he, "with her 
 hopping and trotting. She travels sideways 
 like a crab, so she does. She has a squint in 
 her walk. Her boots have a bias outwards, 
 I'm getting bow-legged, so I am, slewing 
 round corners after her. I'll have to put my 
 foot down," said he. 
 
 And now it was all finished. Here was 
 twelve o'clock at night and an absent wife — 
 a detestable combination. Twelve o'clock at 
 night outside a house is an immoral hour, 
 inside a hoi^se it is non-moral, but respec- 
 table. There is nothing in the street at that 
 time but dubiety. Who would be a husband 
 listening through the tolling of midnight for 
 a muffled footfall ? — And he had told her not 
 to go: had given an order, formulated his 
 imperative and inflexible will — 
 
 "Never mind! I'll stand by it," said he, 
 "this is the last straw. One break and then 
 freedom. Surgery is better than tinkering. 
 Cut the knot and let who will try to join it 
 then. One pang, and afterwards ease, fresh 
 air, and freedom : fresh air ! gulps of it, with 
 the head back and an easy mind. I'm not 
 
28 HERE ARE LADIES 
 
 the man to be fooled for ever — surgery! 
 surgery !" 
 
 His wife had wished to see a friend that 
 night and requested her husband to go with 
 her — ^he refused — 
 
 "You're always trapsin about," said he. 
 
 She entreated. 
 
 He heaved an angry forehead at her, 
 puckered an eye, toned a long No that 
 wagged vibration behind it like an undocked 
 tail. 
 
 She persisted, whereupon he loosed his 
 thunder — 
 
 "You're not to step outside the house this 
 night, ma'am," said he ; and to her angry "I 
 will go," he barked, "If you do go, don't 
 come back here. I'll have a dutiful wife or 
 I'll have none — stay in or stay out. I'm 
 tired humouring your whimsies, let you hu- 
 mour mine now " 
 
 Then a flame gathered on her face, it grew 
 hot in her voice, flashed to a point in her 
 eyes — 
 
 "I'm going out to-night," said she loudly; 
 "are you coming with me ?" 
 
 "I'm not," said he. 
 
 "Then," she snapped, "I'll go by myself." 
 
 "Wherever you go to-night you can stay," 
 
THREE HEAVY HUSBANDS 29 
 
 he roared. "Don't come back to this house." 
 
 "I'm not mad enough to want to," she 
 replied. "I wish I'd never seen your old 
 house. I wish I'd never seen yourself. You 
 are just as dull as your house is, and nearly 
 as flat. It's a stupid, uninteresting, slow 
 house, so it is, and you are a stupid, dissatis- 
 fied grump of a man, so you are. I'd sooner 
 live in a cave with a hairy bear, so I 
 would " and out she ran. 
 
 Two minutes later he had heard the door 
 bang, and then silence. 
 
 That was five hours ago, and during all 
 these long hours he had sat staring sourly 
 into the fire, seeing goodness knows what 
 burnt-up visions therein, waiting to hear a 
 footfall, and an entreating voice at the key- 
 hole ; apologies and tears perhaps, and prom- 
 ises of amendment. Now it was after twelve 
 o'clock, darkness everywhere and silence. 
 Time and again a policeman's tramp or the 
 hasty, light footfall of adventure went by. 
 So he stood up at last sour and vindictive — 
 
 "She would have her fling. She wouldn't 
 give in. She doesn't care a tinker's curse 
 what I say. . . . Let her go to Jericho," 
 said he, and he tramped up to bed. 
 
30 HERE ARE LADIES 
 
 In his bedroom he did not trouble to get 
 a light. He undressed in a bitterly savage 
 mood and rolled into bed, only to jump out 
 again in sudden terror, for there was some 
 one in it. It was his wife. He lay down 
 with a hazy, half-mad mind. Had he 
 wronged her ? Was she more amenable than 
 he had fancied? She had not gone out at all 
 — or, had she gone out, sneaked in again 
 by the back door and crept noiselessly to 
 bed. . . .? 
 
 He fell asleep at last on the tattered fringe 
 of a debate — Had he wronged her? or had 
 she diddled him again? 
 
A GLASS OF BEER 
 
A GLASS OF BEER 
 
 It was now his custom to sit there. The 
 world has its habits, why should a man not 
 have his? The earth rolls out of light and. 
 into darkness as punctually as a business man 
 goes to and from his office ; the seasons come 
 with the regularity of automata, and go as if 
 they were pushed by an ejector; so, night 
 after night, he strolled from the Place de 
 rObservatoire to the Pont St. Michel, and, 
 on the return journey, sat down at the same 
 Cafe, at the same table, if he could manage 
 it, and ordered the same drink. 
 
 S'' /egular had his attendance become that 
 the waiter would suggest the order before it 
 was spoken. He did not drink beer because 
 he liked it, but only because it was not a 
 difficult thing to ask for. Always he had 
 been easily discouraged, and he distrusted 
 his French almost as much as other people 
 had reason to. The only time he had varied 
 the order was to request "un vin blanc 
 
 33 
 
34 HERE ARE LADIES 
 
 gommee," but on that occasion he had been 
 served with a postage stamp for twenty-five 
 centimes, and he still wondered when he re- 
 membered it. 
 
 He liked to think of his first French con- 
 versation. He wanted something to read in 
 English, but was timid of asking for it. He 
 walked past all the newspaper kiosks on the 
 Boulevard, anxiously scanning the vendors 
 inside — they were usually very stalwart, very 
 competent females, who, looked as though 
 they had outgrown their sins but remem- 
 bered them with pleasure. They had the 
 dully-polished, slightly-battered look of a 
 modern antique. The words "M'sieu, Ma- 
 dame" rang from them as from bells. They 
 were very alert, sitting, as it were, on tiptoe, 
 and their eyes hit one as one approached. 
 They were like spiders squatting in their lit- 
 tle houses waiting for their daily flies. 
 
 He found one who looked jolly and harm- 
 less, sympathetic indeed, and to her, with a 
 flourished hat, he approached. Said he, 
 "Donnez-moi, Madame, s'il vous plait, le 
 Daily Mail." At the second repetition the 
 good lady smiled at him, a smile compounded 
 of benevolence and comprehension, and in- 
 stantly, with a "Via M'sieu," she handed 
 
A GI.ASS OF BEER 35 
 
 him The New York Herald. They had 
 saluted each other, and he marched down 
 the road in delight, with his first purchase 
 under his arm and his first foreign conver- 
 sation accomplished. 
 
 At that time everything had delighted 
 him — the wide, well-lighted Boulevard, the 
 concierges knitting in their immense door- 
 ways, each looking like a replica of the other, 
 each seeming sister to a kiosk-keeper or a 
 cat. The exactly-courteous speech of the 
 people and their not quite so rigorously cour- 
 teous manners pleased him. He listened to 
 the voluble men who went by, speaking in 
 a haste so breathless that he marvelled how 
 the prepositions and conjunctions stuck to 
 their duty in so swirling an ocean of chatter. 
 There was a big black dog with a mottled 
 head who lay nightly on the pavement oppo- 
 site the Square de I'Observatoire. At inter- 
 vals he raised his lean skull from the ground 
 and composed a low lament to an absent 
 friend. His grief was respected. The folk 
 who passed stepped sidewards for him, and 
 he took no heed of their passage — a lonely, 
 introspective dog to whom a caress or a 
 bone were equally childish things: Let me 
 alone, he seemed to say, I have my grief. 
 
36 HERE ARE LADIES 
 
 and it is company enough. There was the 
 very superior cat who sat on every window- 
 ledge, winking at life. He (for in France 
 all cats are masculine by order of philology), 
 he did not care a rap for man oi- dog, but he 
 liked women and permitted them to observe 
 him. There was the man who insinuated 
 himself between the tables at the Cafe, hold- 
 ing out postcard-representations of the Pan- 
 theon, the Louvre, Notre Dame, and other 
 places. From beneath these cards his dex- 
 terous little finger would suddenly flip others. 
 One saw a hurried leg, an arm that shone 
 and vanished, a bosom that fled shyly again, 
 an audacious swan, a Leda who was thor- 
 oughly enjoying herself and had never heard 
 of virtue. His look suggested that he 
 thought better of one than to suppose that 
 one was not interested in the nude. "M'sieu," 
 he seemed to say, with his fixed, brown-eyed 
 regard, "this is indeed a leg, an authentic leg, 
 not disguised by even the littlest of stock- 
 ings; it is arranged precisely as M'sieu 
 would desire it." His sorrow as he went 
 away was dignified with regret for an in- 
 artistic gentleman. One was en gargon, and 
 yet one would not look at one's postcards! 
 One had better then cease to be an artist and 
 
A GI.ASS OF BEER 37 
 
 take to peddling onions and asparagus as the 
 vulgar do. 
 
 It was all a long time ago, and now, some- 
 how, the savour had departed from these 
 things. Perhaps he had seen them too often. 
 Perhaps a kind of public surreptitiousness, 
 a quite open furtiveness, had troubled him. 
 Maybe he was not well. He sat at his Cafe, 
 three quarters down the Boulevard, and be- 
 fore him a multitude of grotesque beings 
 were pacing as he sipped his bock. 
 
 Good manners decreed that he should not 
 stare too steadfastly, and he was one who 
 obeyed these delicate dictations. Alas! he 
 was one who obeyed all dictates. For him 
 authority wore a halo, and many sins which 
 his heyday ought to have committed had 
 been left undone only because they were not 
 sanctioned by immediate social usage. He 
 was often saddened when he thought of the 
 things he had not done. It was the only 
 sadness to which he had access, because the 
 evil deeds which he had committed were of 
 so tepid and hygienic a character that they 
 could not be mourned for without hypocrisy, 
 and now that he was released from all privi- 
 leged restraints and overlookings and could 
 
38 HERE ARE LADIES 
 
 do whatever he wished he had no wish to do 
 anything. 
 
 His wife had been dead for over a year. 
 He had hungered, he had prayed for her 
 death. He had hated that woman (and for 
 how many years!) with a kind of masked 
 ferocity. How often he had been tempted 
 to kill her or to kill himself! How often 
 he had dreamed that she had run away from 
 him or that he had run away from her ! He 
 had invented Russian Princes, and Music 
 Hall Stars, and American Billionaires with 
 whom she could adequately elope, and he had 
 both loved and loathed the prospect. What 
 unending, slow quarrels they had together! 
 How her voice had droned pitilessly on his 
 ears! She in one room, he in another, and 
 through the open door there rolled that un- 
 ending recitation of woes and reproaches, an 
 interminable catalogue of nothings, while he 
 sat dumb as a fish, with a mind that smoul- 
 dered or blazed. He had stood unseen with 
 a hammer, a poker, a razor in his hand, on 
 tiptoe to do it. A movement, a rush, one 
 silent rush and it was done ! He had revelled 
 in her murder. He had caressed it, re- 
 hearsed it, relished it, had jerked her head 
 
A GLASS OF BEER 39 
 
 back, and hacked, and listened to her en- 
 treaties bubbling through blood ! 
 
 And then she died! When he stood by 
 her bed he had wished to taunt her, but he 
 could not do it. He read in her eyes — I am 
 dying, and in a little time I shall have van- 
 ished like dust on the wind, but you will still 
 be here, and you will never see me again — 
 He wished to ratify that, to assure her that it 
 was actually so, to say that he would come 
 home on the morrow night, and she would 
 not be there, and that he would return home 
 every night, and she would never be there. 
 But he could not say it. Somehow the words, 
 although he desired them, would not come. 
 His arm went to her neck and settled there. 
 His hand caressed her hair, her cheek. He 
 kissed her eyes, her lips, her languid hands ; 
 and the words that came were only an infan- 
 tile babble of regrets and apologies, assur- 
 ances that he did love her, that he had never 
 loved any one before, and never would love 
 any one again. . . . 
 
 Every one who passed looked into the Cafe 
 where he sat. Every one who passed looked 
 at him. There were men with sallow faces 
 and wide black hats. Some had hair that 
 flapped about them in the wind, and from 
 
40 HERE ARE LADIES 
 
 their locks one gathered, with some distaste, 
 the spices of Araby. Some had cravats that 
 fluttered and fell and rose again like banners 
 in a storm. There were men with se- 
 vere, spade-shaped, most responsible-looking 
 beards, and quizzical little eyes which gave 
 the lie to their hairy sedateness — eyes which 
 had spent long years in looking sidewards 
 as a woman passed. There were men of 
 every stage of foppishness — men who had 
 spent so much time on their moustaches that 
 they had only a little left for their finger- 
 nails, but their moustaches exonerated them ; 
 others who were coated to happiness, trous- 
 ered to grotesqueness, and booted to mis- 
 ery. He thought — In this city the men wear 
 their own coats, but they all wear some one 
 else's trousers, and their boots are syndi- 
 cated. 
 
 He saw no person who was self-intent. 
 They were all deeply conscious, not of them- 
 selves, but of each other. They were all 
 looking at each other. They were all looking 
 at him; and he returned the severe, or hu- 
 mourous, or appraising gaze of each with a 
 look nicely proportioned to the passer, giving 
 back exactly what was given to him, and no 
 more. He did not stare, for nobody stared. 
 
A GLASS OF BEER 41 
 
 He just looked and looked away, and was as 
 mannerly as was required. 
 
 A negro went by arm in arm with a girl 
 who was so sallow that she was only white 
 by courtesy. He was a bulky man, and as 
 he bent greedily over his companion it was 
 evident that to him she was whiter than the 
 snow of a single night. 
 
 Women went past in multitudes, and he 
 knew the appearance of them all. How many 
 times he had watched them or their dupli- 
 cates striding and mincing and bounding by, 
 each moving like an animated note of inter- 
 rogation ! They were long, and medium, and 
 short. There were women of a thinness be- 
 yond comparison, sheathed in skirts as f eatly 
 as a rapier in a scabbard. There were 
 women of a monumental, a mighty fatness, 
 who billowed and rolled in multitudinous, 
 stormy garments. There were slow eyes that 
 drooped on one heavily as a hand, and quick 
 ones that stabbed and withdrew, and glanced 
 again appealingly, and slid away cursing. 
 There were some who lounged with a false 
 sedateness, and some who fluttered in an 
 equally false timidity. Some wore velvet 
 shoes without heels. Some had shoes, the 
 heels whereof were of such inordinar+e length 
 
42 HERE ARE LADIES 
 
 that the wearers looked as though they were 
 perched on stilts and would topple to perdi- 
 tion if their skill failed for an instant. They 
 passed and they looked at him; and from 
 each, after the due regard, he looked away to 
 the next in interminable procession. 
 
 There were faces also to be looked at: 
 round chubby faces where from the eyes of 
 oxen stared in slow, involved rumination. 
 Long faces that were keener than hatchets 
 iand as cruel. Faces that pretended to be 
 scornful and were only piteous. Faces con- 
 trived to ape a temperament other than their 
 own. Raddled faces with heavy eyes and 
 rouged lips. Ragged lips that had been 
 chewed by every mad dog in the world. 
 What lips there were everywhere! Bright 
 scarlet splashes in dead-white faces. Thin 
 red gashes that suggested rat-traps instead 
 of kisses. Bulbous, flabby lips that would 
 wobble and shiver if attention failed them. 
 Lips of a horrid fascination that one looked 
 at and hated and ran to. . . . Looking at 
 him slyly or boldly, they passed along, and 
 turned after a while and repassed him, and 
 turned again in promenade. 
 
 He had a sickness of them all. There 
 had been a time when these were among the 
 
A GLASS OF BEER 43 
 
 things he mourned for not having done, but 
 that time was long past. He guessed at their 
 pleasures, and knew them to be without salt. 
 Life, said he, is as unpleasant as a plate of 
 cold porridge. Somehow the world was 
 growing empty for him. He wondered was 
 he outgrowing his illusions, or his appetites, 
 or both? The things in which other men 
 took such interest were drifting beyond him, 
 and ( for it seemed that the law of compensa- 
 tion can fail) nothing was drifting towards 
 him in recompense. He foresaw himself as 
 a box with nothing inside it, and he thought 
 — It is not through love or fear or distress 
 that men commit suicide: it is because they 
 have become empty: both the gods and the 
 devils have deserted them and they can no 
 longer support that solemn stagnation. He 
 marvelled to see with what activity men and 
 women played the most savourless of games ! 
 With what zest of pursuit they tracked what 
 petty interests. He saw them as ants scurry- 
 ing with scraps of straw, or apes that pick 
 up and drop and pick again, and he mar- 
 velled from what fount they renewed them- 
 selves, or with what charms they exorcised 
 the demons of satiety. 
 
 On this night life did not seem worth 
 
44 HERE ARE LADIES 
 
 while. The taste had gone from his mouth ; 
 his bock was water vilely coloured ; his cigar- 
 ette was a hot stench. And yet a full moon 
 was peeping in the trees along the path, and 
 not far away, where the countryside bowed 
 in silver quietude, the rivers ran through 
 undistingfuishable fields chanting their lonely 
 songs. The seas leaped and withdrew, and 
 called again to the stars, and gathered in 
 ecstasy and roared skywards, and the trees 
 did not rob each other more than was abso- 
 lutely necessary. The men and women were 
 all hidden away, sleeping in their cells, where 
 the moon could not see them, nor the clean 
 wind, nor the stars. They were sundered for 
 a little while from their eternal arithmetic. 
 The grasping hands were lying as quietly as 
 the paws of a sleeping dog. Those eyes held 
 no further speculation than the eyes of an 
 ox who lies down. The tongues that had 
 lied all day, and been treacherous and ob- 
 scene and respectful by easy turn, said noth- 
 ing more; and he thought it was very good 
 that they were all hidden, and that for a 
 little time the world might swing darkly with 
 the moon in its own wide circle and its 
 silence. 
 
A GLASS OF BEER 45 
 
 He paid for his bocic, gave the waiter a 
 tip, touched his hat to a lady by sex and a 
 gentleman by clothing, and strolled back to 
 his room that was little, his candle that was 
 three-quarters consumed, and his picture 
 which might be admired when he was dead 
 but which he would never be praised for 
 painting; and, after sticking his foot through 
 the canvas, he tugged himself to bed, agree- 
 ing to commence the following morning 
 just as he had the previous one, and the one 
 before that, and the one before that again. 
 
ONE AND ONE 
 
 Do you hate me, you! 
 Sitting quietly there, 
 With the burnished hair 
 That frames the two 
 Deep eyes of your face 
 In a smooth embrace. 
 
 And you say naught, 
 And I never speak; 
 But you rest your cheek 
 On your hand, a thought 
 Showing plain as the brow 
 Goes wrinkling now. 
 
 Of what do you think, 
 Sitting opposite me. 
 As you stir the tea 
 That you do not drink, 
 And frown at nought 
 With those brows of thought. 
 
THREE WOMEN WHO WEPT 
 
THREE WOMEN WHO WEPT 
 
 He was one of those men who can call ladies 
 by their Christian names. One day he met 
 twenty- four duchesses walking on a red car- 
 pet, and he winked at them, and they were 
 all delighted. It was so at first he appeared 
 to her. Has a mere girl any protection 
 against a man of that quality? and she was 
 the very merest of girls — she knew it. It 
 was not that she was ignorant, for she had 
 read widely about men, and she had three 
 brothers as to whom she knew divers inti- 
 mate things. 
 
 The girl who has been reared among 
 brothers has few defences against other 
 males. She has acquired two things — a be- 
 lief in the divine right of man, and a curios- 
 ity as to what those men are like who are 
 not her brothers. She may love her brothers, 
 but she cannot believe that they adequately 
 represent the other sex. Does not every girl 
 51 
 
52 HERE ARE tADlES 
 
 wish to marry the antithesis of her brother ? 
 The feeling is that one should marry as far 
 outside of the family as is possible, and as 
 far outside of one's self as may be; but love 
 has become subject to geography, and our 
 choice is often bounded by the tramline upon 
 which we travel from our houses to our busi- 
 nesses and back again. 
 
 While she loved and understood her 
 brothers, she had not in the least understood 
 or believed in the stories she had read, and 
 so, when the Young Man out of a Book came 
 to her, she was delighted but perplexed. 
 
 It was difficult to live up to him worthily. 
 It was difficult to know what he would do 
 next, and it was exceedingly difficult to keep 
 out of his way; for, indeed, he seemed to 
 pervade the part of the world where she 
 lived. He was as ubiquitous as the air or 
 the sky. If she went into a shop, he was 
 pacing on the pavement when she came out. 
 If she went for a walk he was standing at 
 the place farther than which she had decided 
 not to go. She had found him examining a 
 waterfall on the Dodder, leaning over the 
 bear-pit in the Zoological Gardens, and 
 kneeling beside her in the Chapel, and her 
 sleep had been distressed by the reflection 
 
THREE WOMEN WHO WEPT 53 
 
 that maybe he was sitting on her window-sill 
 like a sad sparrow drenched in the rain, all 
 its feathers on end with the cold, and its eyes 
 wide open staring at misery. 
 
 The first time they met he spoke to her. 
 He plucked a handkerchief from somewhere 
 and thrust it into her hand, saying — 
 
 "You have dropped this, I think" — and 
 she had been too alarmed to disown it. 
 
 It was a mighty handkerchief. It was so 
 big that it would scarcely fit into her muff. — 
 "It is a table-cloth," said she, as she solemnly 
 stuffed away its lengthy flaps. "It is his 
 own," she thought a moment later, and she 
 would have laughed like a mad woman, only 
 that she had no time, for he was pacing deli- 
 cately by her side, and talking in a low voice 
 that was partly a whisper and partly a 
 whistle, and was entirely and disturbingly 
 delicious. 
 
 The next time they met very suddenly. 
 Scarcely a dozen paces separated them. She 
 could see him advancing towards her, and 
 knew by his knitted brows that he was 
 searching anxiously for something to say. 
 When they drew together he lifted his hat 
 and murmured — 
 
 "How is your handkerchief to-day?" 
 
54 HERE ARE LADIES 
 
 The query so astonished her that (the verb 
 is her own) she simply bawled with laughter. 
 From that moment he treated her with free- 
 dom, for if once you laugh with a person you 
 admit him to equality, you have ranked him 
 definitely as a vertebrate, your hand is his by 
 right of species, scarcely can you withhold 
 even your lips from his advances. 
 
 Another, a strange, a fascinating thing, 
 was that he was afraid of her. It was in- 
 conceivable, it was mad, but it was true. He 
 looked at her with disguised terror. His 
 bravado was the slenderest mask. Every 
 word he said was uttered tentatively, it was 
 subject to her approval, and if she opposed 
 a statement he dropped it instantly and 
 adopted her alternative as one adopts a gift. 
 This astonished her who had been prepared 
 to be terrified. He kept a little distance be- 
 tween them as he walked, and when she 
 looked at him he looked away. She had a 
 vision of herself as an ogre — whiskers 
 sprouted all over her face, her ears bulged 
 and swaggled, her voice became a cavernous 
 rumble, her conversation sounded like fee- 
 faw-fum — and yet, her brothers were not 
 afraid of her in the least; they pinched her 
 and kicked her hat. 
 
THREE WOMEN WHO WEPT 55 
 
 He spoke (but always without prejudice) 
 of the loveliest things imaginable — matters 
 about which brothers had no conception, and 
 for which they would not have any rever- 
 ence. He said one day that the sky was 
 blue, and, on looking she found that it was 
 so. The sky was amazingly blue. It had 
 never struck her before, but there was a 
 colour in the firmament before which one 
 might fall down and worship. Sunlight was 
 not the hot glare which it had been : it was 
 rich, generous, it was inexpressibly beauti- 
 ful. The colour and scent of flowers became 
 more varied. The world emerged as from 
 shrouds and cerements. It was tender and 
 radiant, comeliness lived everywhere, and 
 goodwill. Laughter! the very ground bub- 
 bled with it : the grasses waved their hands, 
 the trees danced and curtsied to one another 
 with gentle dignity, and the wind lurched 
 down the path with its hat on the side of its 
 head and its hands in its pockets, whistling 
 like her younger brother. 
 
 And then he went away. She did not see 
 him any more. He was not by the waterfall 
 on the Dodder, nor hanging over the bear-pit 
 in the Zoo. He was not in the Chapel, nor 
 
56 HERE ARE LADIES 
 
 on the pavement when she came out of a 
 shop. He was not anywhere. She searched, 
 but he was not anywhere. And the sun be- 
 came the hot pest it had always been: the 
 heavens were stuffed with dirty clouds the 
 way a second-hand shop is stuffed with dirty 
 bundles : the trees were hulking corner-boys 
 with muddy boots : the wind blew dust into 
 her eye, and her brothers pulled her hair and 
 kicked her hat ; so that she went apart from 
 all these. She sat before the mirror regard- 
 ing herself with woeful amazement — 
 
 "He was afraid of me !" she said. 
 
 And she wept into his monstrous handker- 
 chief. 
 
II 
 
 When he came into the world he came howl- 
 ing, and he howled without ceasing for seven 
 long years, except at the times when he hap- 
 pened to be partaking of nourishment, or 
 was fast asleep, and, even then, he snored 
 with a note of defiance and protest which 
 proved that his humour was not for peace. 
 
 The time came when he ceased to howl 
 and became fascinated by the problem of how 
 to make other people howl. In this art he 
 became an adept. When he and another 
 child chanced to be left together there came, 
 apparently from the uttermost ends cf the 
 earth, a pin, and the other child and the pin 
 were soon in violent and lamentable con- 
 junction. 
 
 So he grew. 
 
 "Be hanged if I know what to do with 
 him," said his father as he rebuckled on his 
 belt. "The devil's self hasn't got the shape 
 or match of such an imp in all the length and 
 breadth of his seven hells. I'm sick, sore 
 
 57 
 
58 HERE ARE LADIES 
 
 and sorry whacking him, so I am, and before 
 long I'll be hung on the head of him. I'm 
 saying that there's more deceit and devilment 
 in his bit of a carcass than there is in a pub- 
 lic-house full of tinkers, so there is." 
 
 He turned to his wife — 
 
 "It's no credit at all the son you've bore 
 me, ma'am, but a sorrow and a woe that'll be 
 killing us in our old age and maybe damning 
 our souls at the heel of it. Where he got his 
 blackguardly ways from I'm not saying, but 
 it wasn't from my side of the house anyway, 
 so it wasn't, and that's a moral. Get out of 
 my sight you sniffling lout, and if ever I 
 catch you at your practices again I'll lam you 
 till you won't be able to wink without help, 
 so I will." 
 
 "]\Tusha," sobbed his wife, "don't be al- 
 ways talking out of you. Any one would 
 think that it was an old, criminal thief you 
 were instructing, instead of a bit of a child 
 that'll be growing out of his wildness in no 
 time. Come across to me, child, come over 
 to your mother, my lamb." 
 
 That night, when his father got into bed, 
 he prodded his foot against something under 
 the sheets. Investigation discovered a brown 
 paper bag at the end of the bed. A further 
 
THREE WOMEN WHO WEPT 59 
 
 search revealed a wasp's nest, inside of 
 which there was an hundred angry wasps 
 blazing for combat. His father left the room 
 with more expedition than decency. He did 
 not stop to put on as much as his hat. He 
 fled to the stream which ran through the 
 meadow at the back of their house, and lay 
 down in it, and in two seconds there was 
 more bad language than water in the stream. 
 Every time he lifted his head for air the 
 wasps flew at him with their tails curled. 
 They kept him there for half an hour, and 
 in that time he laid in the seeds of more 
 rheumatism than could be cured in two life- 
 times. 
 
 When he returned home he found his wife 
 lying on the floor with a blanket wrapped 
 about her head, groaning by instinct, for she 
 was senseless. 
 
 Her face had disappeared. There was 
 nothing where it had been but poisoned 
 lumps. A few days later it was found that 
 she was blind of one eye, and there was dan- 
 ger of erysipelas setting in. 
 
 The boy could not be found for some 
 time, but a neighbour, observing a stone 
 come from nowhere in particular and hit a 
 cat, located the first cause in a ditch. He 
 
6o HERE ARE LADIES 
 
 brought the boy home, and grabbed his 
 father just in time to prevent murder being 
 done. 
 
 It was soon found that the only thing 
 which eased the restless moaning woman was 
 the touch of her son. All her unmanageable, 
 delirious thoughts centred on him — 
 
 "Sure he's only a boy; beating never did 
 good to anything. Give him a chance now 
 for wouldn't a child be a bit wild anyhow. 
 You will be a good boy, won't you? Come 
 to your mother, my lamb." 
 
 So the lad grew, from twelve to fifteen, 
 from fifteen to twenty. Soon he attained to 
 manhood. To his mother he seemed to have 
 leaped in a day from the careless, prattling 
 babe to the responsibly-whiskered miracle at 
 whom mothers sit and laugh in secret delight. 
 This towering, big- footed, hairy person ! was 
 he really the little boy who used to hide in 
 her skirts when his father scowled ? She had 
 only to close her eyes and she could feel again 
 a. pair of little hands clawing at her breast, 
 sore from the violent industry of soft, wee 
 lips. 
 
 So he grew. Breeches that were big be- 
 came small. Bony wrists were continually 
 pushing out of coat cuffs. His feet would 
 
THREE WOMEN WHO WEPT 6i 
 
 burst out of his boots. He grew out of 
 everything but one. A man may outgrow his 
 breeches, he cannot outgrow his nature : his 
 body is never too big or too small to hold 
 that. 
 
 Every living thing in the neighbourhood 
 knew him. When a cat saw him coming it 
 climbed a tree and tried to look as much like 
 a lump of wood as it could. When a dog 
 heard his step it tucked its tail out of sight 
 and sought for a hole in the hedge. The 
 birds knew he carried stones in his pockets. 
 No tree cast so black a shadow in the sun- 
 light as he did. There were stories of a bot- 
 tle of paraffin oil and a cat that screeched 
 in flames. Folk told of a maltreated dog 
 that pointed its nose to heaven and bayed a 
 curse against humanity until a terrified man 
 battered it to death with a shovel. No one 
 knew who did it, but every one said there 
 were only two living hearts capable of these 
 iniquities — one belonged to the devil, the 
 other to our young man, and they acquitted 
 Satan of the deeds. 
 
 The owner of the dog swore by the beasts 
 in the field and the stars in the sky that he 
 would tear the throat of the man who had 
 injured his beast. 
 
62 HERE ARE LADIES 
 
 The father drove his one-eyed wife from 
 the house, and went with her to live else- 
 where ; but she left him and went back to her 
 son, and her husband forswore the twain. 
 
 When women saw him in the road they got 
 past him with their breath hissing through 
 their teeth in fear. When men passed him 
 they did it warily, with ther fists clenched 
 and their eyes alert. He was shunned by 
 every one. The strength of his arms also 
 was a thing to be afraid of, and in the world 
 there was but two welcomes for him, one 
 from his mother, the other from an old, grey 
 rat that slept in his breast — 
 
 "Sure, you're all against him," his mother 
 would say. "Why don't you give the boy a 
 chance? It's only the hot blood of youth 
 that's working in him — and he never did it 
 either. Look how kind he is to me! never 
 the bad word or the hard look! Ye black 
 hearts that blame my boy, look among your- 
 selves for the villain. No matter who is 
 against you, come to your mother, my lamb." 
 
 He was found one day at the foot of the 
 cliff with his neck broken. Some said that 
 he had slipped and fallen, some said he had 
 committed suicide, other some pursed their 
 
THREE WOMEN WHO WEPT 63 
 
 lips tightly and said nothing. All were re- 
 lieved that he was gone, saving his mother 
 only, she mourned for her only son, and wept 
 bitterly, refusing to be comforted until she 
 died. 
 
Ill 
 
 Sh^ had begun to get thin. Her face was 
 growing sharp and peaked. The steady 
 curve of her cheek had become a Httle inde- 
 terminate. Her chin had begun to sag and 
 her eyes to look a httle weary. But she had 
 not observed these things, for we do not 
 notice ourselves very much until some other 
 person thinks we are worthy of observation 
 and tells us so; and these changes are so 
 gradual and tiny that we seldom observe 
 them until we awaken for a moment or two 
 in our middle age and then we get ready to 
 fall asleep again. 
 
 When her uncle died, the solicitors who 
 had administered his will handed her a small 
 sum of money and intimated that from that 
 date she must hew out her own path in life, 
 and as she had most of the household furni- 
 ture of her late uncle at her disposal, she 
 decided to let lodgings. Setting about that 
 end with all possible expedition she finished 
 writing "apartments to let" on a square of 
 64 
 
THREE WOMEN WHO WEPT 65 
 
 pasteboard, and, having placed it promi- 
 nently in a window, she folded her mittened 
 hands and sat down with some trepidation 
 to await the advent of a lodger. 
 
 He came in the night time with the stars 
 and the moon. He was running like a youth- 
 ful god, she thought, for her mind had not 
 yet been weaned from certain vanities, and 
 she could not see that a gigantic policeman 
 was in his wake, tracking him with elephan- 
 tine bounds, and now and again snatching 
 a gasp from hurry to blow furious warnings 
 on a whistle. 
 
 It was the sound of the whistle which 
 opened her eyes through her ears. She went 
 to the door and saw him coming framed in 
 the moonlight, his arms pressed tightly to his 
 sides, his head well up and his feet kicking a 
 mile a minute on the pavement. Behind him 
 the whistle shrilled with angry alarm, and 
 the thunder of monumental feet came near 
 as the policeman sprinted in majesty. 
 
 As the lodger ran she looked at him. He 
 was a long-legged, young man with a pleas- 
 ant, clean-shaven face. His eyes met hers, 
 and, although he grinned anxiously, she saw 
 that he was frightened. That frightened 
 
66 HERE ARE LADIES 
 
 smile gripped her and she panted noiselessly, 
 "Oh, run, run!" 
 
 As he drew level he fixed his gaze on 
 her, and, stopping suddenly, he ducked under 
 her arm and was inside the house in a twin- 
 kling. 
 
 The poor lady's inside curled up in fear 
 and had started to uncurl in screams when 
 she felt a hand laid gently on her arm, and, 
 "Don't make a noise, or I'm caught," said a 
 voice, whereupon, and with exceeding diffi- 
 culty, she closed her mouth while the scream 
 went sizzling through her teeth in little 
 gasps. But now the enemy appeared round 
 the corner, tooting incessantly on his whistle, 
 and whacking sparks from the cobblestones 
 as he ran. Behind her she could hear the 
 laboured breathing of a spent runner. The 
 lodger was kneeling at her skirts : he caught 
 her hand and pressed his face against it en- 
 treatingly — 
 
 The policeman drew near — 
 
 "Did you see a fellow skedaddling along 
 here, ma'am ?" said he. 
 
 She hesitated for only a moment and then, 
 pointing to a laneway opposite, replied — 
 
 "He went up there." 
 
 "Thank you, ma'am," said the policeman 
 
THREE WOMEN WHO WEPT 67 
 
 with a genial smile, and he sprinted up the 
 laneway whistling cheerily. 
 
 She turned to the lodger — 
 
 "You had better go now," said she. 
 
 He looked at her ruefully and hesitated — 
 
 "If I go now," he replied, "I'll be caught 
 and get a month. I'll have to eat skilly, you 
 know, and pick oakum, and get my hair cut." 
 
 She looked at his hair — it was brown and 
 wavy, just at his ears it crisped into tiny 
 curls, and she thought it would be a great 
 pity to cut it. He bore her scrutiny well, 
 with just a trifle of embarrassment and a 
 shyly humorous eye — 
 
 "You are the kindest woman I ever met," 
 said he, "and I'll never forget you as long as 
 I live. I'll go away now because I wouldn't 
 like to get you into trouble for helping me." 
 
 "What did you do?" she faltered. 
 
 "I got into a fight with another man," he 
 replied, "and while we were hammering each 
 other the policeman came up. He was going 
 to arrest me, and, before I knew what I was 
 doing, I knocked him down." 
 
 She shook her head — 
 
 "You should not have done that. That 
 was very wrong, for he was only doing his 
 duty." 
 
68 HERE ARE LADIES 
 
 "I know it," he admitted, "but, do you 
 see, I didn't know what I was doing, and 
 then, when I hit him, I got frightened and 
 ran." 
 
 "You poor boy," said she tenderly. 
 
 "And somehow, when I saw yot;, I knew 
 you wouldn't give me up : wasn't it queer ?" 
 
 What a nice, gentlemanly young fellow he 
 is, she thought. 
 
 "But, of course, I cannot be trespassing 
 on your kindness any longer," he continued, 
 "so I'll leave at once, and if ever I get the 
 chance to repay your kindness to a stran- 
 ger 
 
 "Perhaps," said she, "it might not be quite 
 safe for you to go yet. Come inside and I 
 will give you a cup of tea. You must be 
 worn out with the excitement and the danger. 
 Why, you are shaking all over : a cup of tea 
 will steady your nerves and give him time 
 to stop looking for you." 
 
 "Perhaps," said he, "if I turned my coat 
 inside out and turned my trousers up, they 
 wouldn't notice me." 
 
 "We will talk it over," she replied with a 
 wise nod. 
 
 That was how the lodger came. He told 
 her his name and his employment — he was a 
 
THREE WOMEN WHO WEPT 69 
 
 bookmaker's clerk. He brought his luggage, 
 consisting mostly of neckties, to her house 
 the following day from his former lodg- 
 ings— 
 
 "Had a terrible time getting away from 
 them," said he. "They rather liked me, you 
 know, and couldn't make out why I wanted 
 to leave." 
 
 "As if you weren't quite free to do as you 
 wished," quoth his indignant new landlady. 
 
 "And .then, when they found I would go, 
 they made me pay two weeks' rent in lieu of 
 notice — mean, wasn't it?" 
 
 "The low people," she replied. "I will not 
 ask you to pay anything this week." 
 
 He put his bandbox on the ground, and 
 shook hands with her — 
 
 "You are a brick," said he, "the last and 
 the biggest of them. There isn't the like of 
 you in this or any other world, and never 
 was and never will be, world without end, 
 amen." 
 
 "Oh, don't say that," said she shyly. 
 
 "I will," he replied, "for it's the truth. 
 I'll hire a sandwichman to stop people in the 
 street and tell it to them. I'll get a week's 
 engagement at the theatre and sing it from 
 the stage. I'll make up a poem about your 
 
70 HERE ARE LADIES 
 
 goodness. I don't know what to do to thank 
 you. Do you see, if I had to pay you now 
 I'd have to pawn something, and I really be- 
 lieve I have pawned everything they'd lend 
 on to get the money for that two weeks' 
 rent. I'm broke until Friday, that's my pay 
 day, but that night I'll come home with my 
 wages piled up on a cart." 
 
 "I can lend you a few shillings until then," 
 said she laughing. 
 
 "Oh, no," said he. "It's not fair. I 
 couldn't do that," but he could. 
 
 Well the light of the world shone out of 
 the lodger. He was like a sea breeze in a 
 soap factory. When he awakened in the 
 morning he whistled. When he came down 
 to breakfast he sang. When he came home 
 in the evening he danced. He had an amaz- 
 ing store of vitality: from the highest hair 
 on the top of his head down to his heels he 
 was alive. His average language was packed 
 with jokes and wonderful curses. He was as 
 chatty as a girl, as good-humoured as a dog, 
 as unconscious as a kitten — and she knew 
 nothing at all of men, except, perhaps, that 
 they wore trousers and were not girls. The 
 only man with whom she had ever come in 
 contact was her uncle, and he might have 
 
THREE WOMEN WHO WEPT 71 
 
 been described as a sniffy old man with a 
 cold; a blend of gruel and grunt, living in an 
 atmosphere of ointment and pills and patent 
 medicine advertisements — and, behold, she 
 was living in unthinkable intimacy with the 
 youngest of young men; not an old, ache- 
 ridden, cough-racked, corn- footed septuage- 
 narian, but a young, fresh- faced, babbling 
 rascal who laughed like the explosion of a 
 blunderbuss, roared songs as long as he was 
 within earshot and danced when he had noth- 
 ing else to do. He used to show her how to 
 do hand-balances on the arm-chair, and while 
 his boots were cocked up in the air she would 
 grow stiff with terror for his safety and for 
 that of the adjacent crockery. 
 
 The first morning she was giving him his 
 breakfast, intending afterwards to have her 
 own meal in the kitchen, but he used language 
 of such strangely attractive ferocity, and 
 glared at her with such a humorously-mad 
 eye that she was compelled to breakfast with 
 him. 
 
 At night, when he returned to his tea, he 
 swore by this and by that he would die of 
 hunger unless she ate with him ; and then he 
 told her all the doings of the day, the bets 
 that had been made and lost, and what sort 
 
^2 HERE ARE LADIES 
 
 of a man his boss was, and he extolled the 
 goodness of his friends, and lectured on the 
 vast iniquity of his enemies. 
 
 So things went until she was as intimate 
 with him as if he had been her brother. One 
 night he came home just a trifle tipsy. She 
 noted at last what was wrong with him, and 
 her heart yearned over the sinner. There 
 were five or six glasses inside of him, and 
 each was the father of an antic. He was an 
 opera company, a gymnasium, and a menag- 
 erie at once, all tinged with a certain hilari- 
 ous unsteadiness which was fascinating. But 
 at last he got to his bed, which was more 
 than she did. 
 
 She sat through the remainder of the night 
 listening to the growth of her half-starved 
 heart. Oh, but there was a warmth there 
 now. . . . ! Springtime and the moon in 
 flood. What new leaves are these which the 
 trees put forth? Bird, singing at the peep 
 of morn, where gottest thou thy song? Be 
 stiH, be still, thou stranger, fluttering a wing 
 at my breast. . . . 
 
 At the end of a month the gods moved, 
 and when the gods move they trample mor- 
 tals in the dust. 
 
THREE WOMEN WHO WEPT 73 
 
 The lodger's employer left Dublin for Lon- 
 don, taking his clerk with him. 
 
 "Good-bye," said he. 
 
 "Good-bye," she replied, "and a pleasant 
 journey to you." 
 
 And she took the card with "Apartments 
 to Let" written upon it and placed it care- 
 fully in the window, and then, folding her 
 mittened hands, she sat down to await the 
 coming of another lodger, and as she sat she 
 wept bitterly. 
 
THE TRIANGLE 
 
THE TRIANGLE 
 
 Nothing is true for ever. A man and a fact 
 will become equally decrepit and will tumble 
 in the same ditch, for truth is as mortal as 
 man, and both are outlived by the tortoise 
 and the crow. 
 
 To say that two is company and three is 
 a crowd is to make a very temporary state- 
 ment. After a short time satiety or use and 
 wont has crept sunderingly between the two, 
 and, if they are any company at all, they are 
 bad company, who pray discreetly but pas- 
 sionately for the crow^ which is censured 
 by the proverb. 
 
 If there had not been a serpent in the 
 Garden of Eden it is likely that the bored in- 
 habitants of Paradise would have been 
 forced to import one from the outside wilds 
 merely to relax the tedium of a too-sustained 
 duet. There ought to be a law that when a 
 man and a woman have been married for a 
 year they should be forcibly separated for 
 another year. In the meantime, as our law- 
 
 77 
 
78 HERE ARE LADIES 
 
 givers have no sense, we will continue to in- 
 voke the serpent. 
 
 Mrs. Mary Morrissy had been married for 
 quite a time to a gentleman of respectable 
 mentality, a sufficiency of money, and a sur- 
 plus of leisure — Good things? We would 
 say so if we dared, for we are growing old 
 and suspicious of all appearances, and we do 
 not easily recognize what is bad or good. Be- 
 yond the social circumference we are con- 
 fronted with a debatable ground where good 
 and bad are so merged that we cannot distin- 
 guish the one from the other. To her hus- 
 band's mental attainments (from no precipi- 
 tate, dizzy peaks did he stare ; it was only a 
 tiny plain with the tiniest of hills in the cen- 
 tre) Mrs. Morrissy extended a courtesy en- 
 tirely unmixed with awe. For his money 
 she extended a hand which could still thrill 
 to an unaccustomed prodigality, but for his 
 leisure (and it was illimitable) she could 
 find no possible use. 
 
 The quality of permanency in a transient 
 world is terrifying. A permanent husband 
 is a bore, and we do not know what to do 
 with him. He cannot be put on a shelf. He 
 cannot be hung on a nail. He will not go 
 out of the house. There is no escape from 
 
THE TRIANGLE 79 
 
 him, and he is always the same. A smile of 
 a certain dimension, moustaches of this in- 
 evitable measurement, hands that waggle and 
 flop like those of automata — these are his. 
 He eats this way and he drinks that way, and 
 he will continue to do so until he stiffens into 
 the ultimate quietude. He snores on this 
 note, he laughs on that, dissonant, unescape- 
 able, unchanging. This is the way he walks, 
 and he does not know how to run. A pre- 
 dictable beast indeed! He is known inside 
 and out, catalogued, ticketed, and he cannot 
 be packed away. 
 
 Mrs. Morrissy did not yet commune with 
 herself about it, but if her grievance was 
 anonymous it was not unknown. There is a 
 back-door to every mind as to every house, 
 and although she refused it house-room, the 
 knowledge sat on her very hearthstone whis- 
 tling for recognition. 
 
 Indeed, she could not look anywhere with- 
 out seeing her husband. He was included in 
 every landscape. His moustaches and the 
 sun rose together. His pyjamas dawned with 
 the moon. When the sea roared so did he, 
 and he whispered with the river and the 
 wind. He was in the picture but was out of 
 drawing. He was in the song but was out 
 
8o HERE ARE LADIES 
 
 of tune. He agitated her dully, surreptitious- 
 ly, unceasingly. She questioned of space in 
 a whisper, "Are we glued together?" said 
 she. There was a bee in a flower, a burly 
 rascal who did not care a rap for any one; 
 he sat enjoying himself in a scented and 
 gorgeous palace, and in him she confided : 
 
 "If," said she to the bee, "if that man 
 doesn't stop talking to me I'll kick him. I'll 
 stick a pin in him if he does not go out for 
 a walk." 
 
 She grew desperately nervous. She was 
 afraid that if she looked at him any longer 
 she would see hirn. To-morrow, she thought, 
 I may notice that he is a short, fat man in 
 spectacles, and that will be the end of every- 
 thing. But the end of everything is also the 
 beginning of everything, and so she was one 
 half in fear and the other half in hope. A 
 little more and she would hate him, and 
 would begin the world again with the same 
 little hope and the same little despair for 
 her meagre capital. 
 
 She had already elaborated a theory that 
 man was intended to work, and that male 
 sloth was offensive to Providence and should 
 be forbidden by the law. At times her 
 tongue thrilled, silently as yet, to certain 
 
THE TRIANGLE 8i 
 
 dicta of the experienced Aunt who had sup- 
 erintended her youth, to the intent that a 
 lazy man is a nuisance to himself and to 
 everybody else; and, at last, she disguised 
 this saying as an anecdote and repeated it 
 pleasantly to her husband. 
 
 He received it coldly, pondered it with 
 disfavour, and dismissed it by arguing that 
 her Aunt had whiskers, that a whiskered 
 female is a freak, and that the intellectual 
 
 exercises of a freak are He lifted his 
 
 eyebrows and his shoulders. He brushed 
 her Aunt from the tips of his fingers and 
 blew her delicately beyond good manners 
 and the mode. 
 
 But time began to hang heavily on both. 
 The intellectual antics of a leisured man be- 
 come at last wearisome; his methods of 
 thought, by mere familiarity, grow distaste- 
 ful; the time comes when all the arguments 
 are finished, there is nothing more to be said 
 on any subject, and boredom, without even 
 the covering, apologetic hand, yawns and 
 yawns and cannot be appeased. Thereupon 
 two cease to be company, and even a ser- 
 pent would be greeted as a cheery and timely 
 visitor. Dismal indeed, and not infrequent, 
 is that time, and the vista therefrom is a 
 
82 HERE ARE LADIES 
 
 long, dull yawn stretching to the horizon and 
 the grave. If at any time we do revalue the 
 values, let us write it down that the person 
 who makes us yawn is a criminal knave, and 
 then we will abolish matrimony and read 
 Plato again. 
 
 The serpent arrived one morning hard on 
 Mrs. Morrissy's pathetic pressure. It had 
 three large trunks, a toy terrier, and a vol- 
 ume of verse. The trunks contained dresses, 
 the dog insects, and the book emotion — a 
 sufficiently enlivening trilogy! Miss Sarah 
 O'Malley wore the dresses in exuberant ro- 
 tation, Mr. Morrissy read the emotional 
 poetry with great admiration, Mrs. Morrissy 
 made friends with the dog, and life at once 
 became complex and joyful. 
 
 Mr. Morrissy, exhilarated by the emo- 
 tional poetry, drew, with an instinct too hu- 
 man to be censured, more and more in the 
 direction of his wife's cousin, and that lady, 
 having a liking for comedy, observed the 
 agile posturings of the gentleman on a ver- 
 bal summit up and down and around which 
 he flung himself with equal dexterity and 
 satisfaction — crudely, he made puns— and 
 the two were further thrown together by 
 the enforced absences of Mrs. Morrissy, 
 
THE TRIANGLE 83 
 
 into a privacy more than sealed, by reason 
 of the attentions of a dog who would climb 
 to her lap, and there, with an angry nose, put 
 to no more than temporary rout the nimble 
 guests of his jacket. Shortly Mrs. Mor- 
 rissy began to look upon the toy terrier with 
 a meditative eye. 
 
 It was from one of these, now periodical, 
 retreats that Mrs. Morrissy first observed 
 the rapt attitude of her husband, and, in- 
 stantly, life for her became bounding, plen- 
 tiful, and engrossing. 
 
 There is no satisfaction in owning that 
 which nobody else covets. Our silver is no 
 more than second-hand, tarnished metal un- 
 til some one else speaks of it in terms of 
 envy. Our husbands are barely tolerable 
 until a lady friend has endeavoured to ab- 
 stract their cloying attentions. Then only 
 do we comprehend that our possessions are 
 unique, beautiful, well worth guarding. 
 
 Nobody has yet pointed out that there is 
 an eighth sense; and yet the sense of prop- 
 erty is more valuable and more detestable 
 than all the others in combination. The 
 person who owns something is civilised. It 
 is man's escape from wolf and monkeydom. 
 It is individuality at last, or the promise of 
 
84 HERE ARE LADIES 
 
 it, while those other ownerless people must 
 remain either beasts of prey or beasts of 
 burden, grinning with ineffective teeth, or 
 bowing stupid heads for their masters' loads, 
 and all begging humbly for last straws and 
 getting them. 
 
 Under a sufficiently equable exterior Mrs. 
 Morrissy's blood was pulsing with greater 
 activity than had ever moved it before. It 
 raced! It flew! At times the tide of it 
 thudded to her head, boomed in her ears, 
 surged in fierce waves against her eyes. 
 Her brain moved with a complexity which 
 would have surprised her had she been 
 capable of remarking upon it. Plot and 
 counterplot! She wove webs horrid as a 
 spider's. She became, without knowing it, 
 a mistress of psychology. She dissected 
 motions and motives. She builded theories 
 precariously upon an eyelash. She pondered 
 and weighed the turning of a head, the hand- 
 ing of a sugar-bowl. She read treason in a 
 laugh, assignations in a song, villainy in a 
 new dress. Deeper and darker things! 
 Profound and vicious depths plunging stark 
 to where the devil lodged in darknesses too 
 dusky for registration ! She looked so stead- 
 ily on these gulfs and murks that at last she 
 
THE TRIANGLE 85 
 
 could see anything she wished to see ; and al- 
 ways, when times were critical, when this 
 and that, abominations indescribable, were 
 separate by no more than a pin's point, she 
 must retire from her watch (alas for a too- 
 sensitive nature!) to chase the enemies of a 
 dog upon which, more than ever, she fixed a 
 meditative eye. 
 
 To get that woman out of the house be- 
 came a pressing necessity. Her cousin car- 
 ried with her a baleful atmosphere. She 
 moved cloudy with doubt. There was a 
 diabolic aura about her face, and her hair 
 was red! These things were patent. Was 
 one blind or a fool? A straw will reveal 
 the wind, so will an eyelash, a smile, the car- 
 riage of a dress. Ankles also ! One saw too 
 much of them. Let it be said then. Teeth 
 and neck were bared too often and too 
 broadly. If modesty was indeed more than 
 a name, then here it was outraged. Shame 
 too! was it only a word? Does one do this 
 and that without even a blush? Even vice 
 should have its good manners, its own de- 
 cent retirements. If there is nothing else 
 let there be breeding! But at this thing the 
 world might look and understand and cen- 
 sure if it were not brass-browed and stupid. 
 
86 HERE ARE IvADlES 
 
 Sneak ! Traitress ! Serpent ! Oh, Serpent ! 
 do you slip into our very Eden? looping your 
 sly coils across our flowers, trailing over 
 our beds of narcissus and our budding rose, 
 crawling into our secret arbours and whis- 
 pering-places and nests of happiness! Do 
 you flaunt and sway your crested head with 
 a new hat on it every day? Oh, that my 
 Aunt were here, with the dragon's teeth, and 
 the red breath, and whiskers to match! 
 Here Mrs. Morrissy jumped as if she had 
 been bitten (as indeed she had been) and re- 
 tired precipitately, eyeing the small dog that 
 frisked about her with an eye almost petri- 
 fied with meditation. 
 
 To get that woman out of the house 
 quickly and without scandal. Not to let her 
 know for a moment, for the blink and twit- 
 ter of an eyelid, of her triumph. To eject 
 her with ignominy, retaining one's own dig- 
 nity in the meantime. Never to let her 
 dream of an uneasiness that might have 
 screamed, an anger that could have bitten 
 and scratched and been happy in the primi- 
 tive exercise. Was such a task beyond her 
 adequacy ? 
 
 Below in the garden the late sun slanted 
 upon her husband, as with declamatory 
 
THE TRIANGLE 87 
 
 hands and intense brows he chanted emo- 
 tional poetry, ready himself on the slope of 
 opportunity to roll into verses from his own 
 resources. He criticised, with agile miscon- 
 ception, the inner meaning, the involved, 
 hard-hidden heart of the poet; and the ser- 
 pent sat before him and nodded. She 
 smiled enchantments at him, and allure- 
 ments, and subtle, subtle disagreements. On 
 the grass at their feet the toy terrier bound- 
 ed from his slumbers and curved an imper- 
 ative and furious hind-leg in the direction 
 of his ear. 
 
 Mrs. Morrissy called the dog, and it fol- 
 lowed her into the house, frisking joyously. 
 From the kitchen she procured a small bas- 
 ket, and into this she packed some old cloths 
 and pieces of biscuit. Then she picked up, 
 the terrier, cuffed it on both sides of the 
 head, popped it into the basket, tucked its 
 humbly-agitated tail under its abject ribs, 
 closed the basket, and fastened it with a 
 skewer. She next addressed a label to her 
 cousin's home, tied it to the basket, and de- 
 spatched a servant with it to the railway- 
 station, instructing her that it should be 
 paid for on delivery. 
 
 At breakfast the following morning her 
 
88 HERE ARE LADIES 
 
 cousin wondered audibly why her little, 
 weeny, tiny pet was not coming for its 
 brecky. 
 
 Mrs. Morrissy, with a smile of infinite 
 sweetness, suggested that Miss O'Malley's 
 father would surely feed the brute when it 
 arrived. "It was a filthy little beast," said 
 she brightly; and she pushed the toast-rack 
 closer to her husband. 
 
 There followed a silence which drowsed 
 and buzzed to eternity, and during which 
 Mr. Morrissy's curled moustaches straight- 
 ened and grew limp and drooped. An edge 
 of ice stiffened around Miss O'Malley. In- 
 credulity, frozen and wan, thawed into 
 swift comprehension and dismay, lit a flame 
 in her cheeks, throbbed burningly at jthe 
 lobes of her ears, spread magnetic and 
 prickling over her whole stung body, and 
 ebbed and froze again to immobility. She 
 opposed her cousin's kind eyes with a stony 
 brow. 
 
 "I think," said she rising, "that I had bet- 
 ter see to my packing." 
 
 "Must you go ?" said Mrs. Morrissy, wiFh 
 courteous unconcern, and she helped herself 
 to cream. Her husband glared insanely at 
 
THE TRIANGLE 89 
 
 a pat of butter, and tried to look like some 
 one who was somewhere else. 
 
 Miss O'Malley closed the door behind her 
 with extreme gentleness. 
 
 Sp the matter lay. But the position was 
 unchanged. For a little time peace would 
 reign in that household, but the same driving 
 necessity remained, and before long another, 
 and perhaps more virulent, serpent would 
 have to be requisitioned for the assuage- 
 ment of those urgent woes. A man's mous- 
 taches will arise with the sun; not Joshua 
 could constrain them to the pillow after the 
 lark had sung reveille. A woman will sit 
 pitilessly at the breakfast table however the 
 male eye may shift and quail. It is the busi- 
 ness and the art of life to degrade perma- 
 nencies. Fluidity is existence, there is no 
 other, and for ever the chief attraction of 
 Paradise must be that there is a serpent in 
 it to keep it lively and wholesome. Lacking 
 the serpent we are no longer in Paradise, 
 we are at home, and our sole entertainment 
 is to yawn when we wish to. 
 
THE DAISIES 
 
 In the scented bud of the morning — O, 
 When the windy grass went rippling far, 
 I saw my dear one walking slow 
 In the field where the daisies are. 
 
 We did not laugh and we did not speak 
 As we wandered happily to and fro; 
 I kissed my dear on either cheek 
 In the bud of the morning — O. 
 
 A lark sang up from the breezy land, 
 A lark sang down from a cloud afar. 
 And she and I went hand in hand 
 In the field where the daisies are. 
 
THREE ANGRY PEOPLE 
 
THREE ANGRY PEOPLE 
 
 He sat cross-legged on the roadside beside 
 a heap of stones, and with slow regularity 
 his hammer swung up and down, cracking a 
 stone into small pieces at each descent. But 
 his heart was not in the work. He hit what- 
 ever stone chanced to be nearest. There 
 was no cunning selection in his hammer, 
 nor any of these oddities of stroke which 
 a curious and interested worker would have 
 essayed for the mere trial of his artistry. 
 
 He was not difficult to become acquainted 
 with, and, after a little conversation, I dis- 
 covered that all the sorrows of the world 
 were sagging from his shoulders. Every- 
 thing he had ever done was wrong, he said. 
 Everything that people had done to him was 
 wrong, that he affirmed; nor had he any 
 hope that matters would mend, for life was 
 poisoned at the fountain-head and there was 
 no justice anywhere. Justice ! he raised his 
 
 95 
 
96 HERE ARE LADIES 
 
 eyebrows with the horrid stare of a man 
 who searches for apparitions; he lowered 
 them again to the bored blink of one who 
 will not believe in apparitions even though 
 he see them — there was not even fairness! 
 Perhaps (and his bearing was mildly toler- 
 ant), perhaps some people believed there was 
 fairness, but he had his share of days to 
 count by and remember. Forty-nine years 
 of here and there, and in and out, and up 
 and down; walking all kinds of roads in all 
 kinds of weathers ; meeting this sort of per- 
 son and that sort, and many an adventure 
 that came and passed away without any 
 good to it — "and now," said he sternly, "I 
 am breaking stones on a bye-way." 
 
 "A bye-road such as this," said I, "has 
 very few travellers, and it may prove a hap- 
 py enough retreat." . 
 
 "Or a hiding-place," said he gloomily. 
 
 We sat quietly for a few moments — 
 
 "Is there no way of being happy?" said I. 
 
 "How could you be happy if you have not 
 got what you want?" and he thumped solidly 
 with his hammer. 
 
 "What do you want?" I asked, 
 
 "Many a thing," said he, "many a thing." 
 
THREE ANGRY PEOPLE 97 
 
 I squatted on the ground in front of him, 
 and he continued — 
 
 "You that are always travelling, did you 
 ever meet a contented person in all your 
 travels?" 
 
 "Yes," said I, "I met a man yesterday, 
 three hills away from here, and he told me 
 he was happy." 
 
 "Maybe he wasn't a poor man?" 
 
 "I asked him that, and he said he had 
 enough to be going on with." 
 
 "I wonder what he had." 
 
 "I wondered too, and he told me. — He 
 said that he had a wife, a son, an apple-tree, 
 and a fiddle. 
 
 "He said, that his wife was dumb, his son 
 was deaf, his apple-tree was barren, and his 
 fiddle was broken." 
 
 "It didn't take a lot to satisfy that man." 
 
 "And he said, that these things, being the 
 way they were, gave him no trouble attend- 
 ing on them, and so he was left with plenty 
 of time for himself." 
 
 "I think the man you are telling me about 
 was a joker; maybe you are a joker your- 
 self for that matter." 
 
 "Tell me," said I, "the sort of things a 
 person should want, for I am a young man. 
 
98 HERE ARE LADIES 
 
 and everything one learns is so much to the 
 good." 
 
 He rested his hammer and stared side- 
 ways down the road, and he remained so, 
 pursing and relaxing his lips, for a little 
 while. At last he said in a low voice — 
 
 "A person wants respect from other peo- 
 ple. — If he doesn't get that, what does he 
 signify more than a goat or a badger? We 
 live by what folk think of us, and if they 
 speak badly of a man doesn't that finish 
 him for ever?" 
 
 "Do people speak well of you?" I asked. 
 
 "They speak badly of me," said he, "and 
 the way I am now is this, that I wouldn't 
 have them say a good word of me at all." 
 
 "Would you tell me why the people speak 
 badly of you?" 
 
 "You are travelling down the road," said 
 he, "and I am staying where I am. We 
 never met before in all the years, and we 
 may never meet again, and so I'll tell you 
 what is in my mind. — A person that has 
 neighbours will have either friends or ene- 
 mies, and it's likely enough that he'll have 
 the last unless he has a meek spirit. And 
 it's the same way with a man that's married, 
 or a man that has a brother. For the neigh- 
 
THREE ANGRY PEOPLE 99 
 
 hours will spy on you from dawn to dark, 
 and talk about you in every place, and a 
 wife will try to rule you in the house and 
 out of the house until you are badgered to a 
 skeleton, and a brother will ask you to give 
 him whatever thing you value most in the 
 world." 
 
 He remained silent for a few minutes, 
 with his hammer eased on his knee, and then, 
 in a more heated strain, he continued — 
 
 "These are three things a man doesn't like 
 — ^he doesn't like to be spied on, and he 
 doesn't like to be ruled and regulated, and 
 he doesn't like to be asked for a thing he 
 wants himself. And, whether he lets him- 
 self be spied on or not, he'll be talked about, 
 and in any case he'll be made out to be a 
 queer man; and if he lets his wife rule him 
 he'll be scorned and laughed at, and if he 
 doesn't let her rule him he'll be called a 
 rough man; and if he once gives to his 
 brother he will have to keep on giving for 
 ever, and if he doesn't give in at all he'll 
 get the bad name and the sour look as he 
 goes about his business." 
 
 "You have bad neighbours, indeed," said I. 
 
 "I'd call them that." 
 
 "And a brother that would ask you for a 
 
loo HERE ARE LADIES 
 
 thing you wanted yourself wouldn't be a de- 
 cent man." 
 
 "He would not." 
 
 "Tell me," said I, "what kind of a wife 
 have you?" 
 
 "She's the same as any one else's wife to 
 look at, but I fancy the other women must 
 be different to live with." 
 
 "Why do you say that?" 
 
 "Because you can hear men laughing and 
 singing in every public-house that you'd go 
 into, and they wouldn't do that if their wives 
 were hard to live with, for nobody could 
 stand a bad comrade. A good wife, a good 
 brother, a good neighbour — these are three 
 good things, but you don't find them lying 
 in every ditch." 
 
 "If you went to a ditch for your wife 
 : !"saidL 
 
 He pursed up his lips at me. 
 
 "I think," said I, "that you need not mind 
 the neighbours so very much for no one 
 can spy on you but yourself. If your mind 
 was in a glass case instead of in a head it 
 would be different; and no one can really 
 rule and regulate you but yourself, and 
 that's well worth doing." 
 
THREE ANGRY PEOPLE loi 
 
 "Different people," said he shortly, "are 
 made differently." 
 
 "Maybe," said I, "your wife would be a 
 good wife to some other husband, and your 
 brother might be decent enough if he had a 
 different brother." 
 
 He wrinkled up his eyes and looked at me 
 very steadily — 
 
 "I'll be saying good-bye to you, young 
 man," said he, and he raised his hammer 
 again and began to beat solemnly on the 
 stones, 
 
 I stood by him for a few minutes, but as 
 he neither spoke nor looked at me again I 
 turned to my own path intending to strike 
 Dublin by the Paps of Dana and the long 
 slopes beyond them. 
 
II 
 
 One day he chucked his job, put up his tools, 
 told the boss he could do this and that, called 
 hurroo to the boys, and sauntered out of the 
 place with a great deal of dignity and one 
 week's wages in cash. 
 
 There were many reasons why he should 
 not have quitted his work, not the lightest of 
 them being that the food of a wife and fam- 
 ily depended on his sticking to it, but a per- 
 son who has a temper cannot be expected to 
 have everything else. 
 
 Nothing makes a man feel better than tell- 
 ing his employer that he and his job can go 
 bark at one another. It is the dream of a 
 great many people, and were it not for the 
 glamour of that idea most folk would com- 
 mit suicide through sheer disgust. Getting 
 the "sack" is an experience which wearies 
 after the first time. Giving the sack is a 
 felicity granted only to a few people. To 
 go home to one's wife with the information 
 that you have been discharged is an adven- 
 
 102 
 
THREE ANGRY PEOPLE 103 
 
 ture which one does not wish to repeat, but 
 to go home and hand her thirty shillings 
 with the statement that you have discharged 
 yourself is not one of the pleasantest ways 
 of passing time. 
 
 His wife's habits were as uncertain as her 
 temper, but not as bad. She had a hot 
 tongue, a red head, a quick fist and a big 
 family — ingredients to compose a peppery 
 dish. They had been only a short time mar- 
 ried when she gave her husband to under- 
 stand that there was to be only one head of 
 that household, and that would not be he. 
 He fought fiercely for a position on the ex- 
 ecutive but he did not get it. His voice in the 
 household economy, which had commenced 
 with the lordly "Let this be done," concluded 
 in the timidly blustering "All right, have it 
 your own way." 
 
 Furthermore, the theory that a woman is 
 helpmate to a man was repugnant to her. 
 She believed and asserted that a man had to 
 be managed, and she had several maxims to 
 which she often gave forcible and contemp- 
 tuous utterance — 
 
 "Let a man go his own road to-day and 
 he will be shaking hands with the devil to- 
 morrow. 
 
104 HERE ARE LADIES 
 
 "Give a man his head and he'll lose it. 
 
 "Whiskers and sense were never found in 
 the same patch. 
 
 "There's more brains in one woman's fin- 
 ger than there is in the congregated crani- 
 ums of a battalion of men folk. 
 
 "Where there is two men there's one fight. 
 Where there's three there's a drinking 
 match, two fights and a fine to be paid." 
 
 But while advocating peace at any price 
 and a tax on muscles that were bigger than 
 a fly's knuckle she was herself a warrior of 
 the breed of Finn and strong enough to 
 scare a pugilist. When she was angry her 
 family got over the garden wall, her hus- 
 band first. She did not think very much of 
 him, and she told him so, but he was suffi- 
 cient of a man not to believe her. 
 
 For a long time he had been a dissatisfied 
 person, leading a grumpy existence which 
 was only made bearable by gusts of solitary 
 blasphemy. When a man curses openly he 
 is healthy enough, but when he takes to 
 either swearing or drinking in secret then 
 he has travelled almost beyond redemption 
 point. 
 
 So behold our man knocking at the door, 
 still warmed by the fray with his late em- 
 
THREE ANGRY PEOPLE 105 
 
 ployer, but with the first tremors of fear be- 
 ginning to tatter up and down his spine. 
 
 His wife opened the door herself. She 
 was engaged in cleaning the place, a duty in 
 which she was by no means remiss, one of 
 the prime points in her philosophy being 
 that a house was not clean until one's food 
 could be eaten off the floor. She was a big 
 comely woman, but at the moment she did 
 not look dainty. A long wisp of red hair 
 came looping down on her shoulders. A 
 smear of soot toned down the roses of her 
 cheek, her arms were smothered in soap 
 suds, and the fact that she was wearing a 
 pair of her husband's boots added nothing 
 to her attractions. 
 
 When she saw her husband standing in 
 the doorway at this unaccustomed hour she 
 was a little taken aback, but, scenting 
 trouble, she at once opened the attack — 
 
 "What in the name of heaven brings you 
 here at this hour of the day, and the place 
 upset the way it is ? Don't walk on the soap, 
 man, haven't you got eyes in your head?" 
 
 "I'm not walking on the soap with my 
 head," he retorted, "if I was I'd see it, and 
 if it wasn't on the floor it wouldn't be trip- 
 ping folk up. A nice thing it is that a man 
 
io6 HERE ARE LADIES 
 
 can't come into his own house without being 
 set sHpping and sliding Hke an acrobat on 
 an iceberg." 
 
 "And," cried his wife, "if I kept the soap 
 locked up it's the nice, clean house you'd 
 have to come into. Not that you'd mind if 
 the place was dirty, I'll say that much for 
 you, for what one is reared to one likes; and 
 what is natural is pleasant. But I got a dif- 
 ferent rearing let me tell you, and while I'm 
 in it I'll have the clean house no matter who 
 wants the dirty one." 
 
 "You will so," said he, looking at the 
 soapy water for a place to walk on. 
 
 "Can't you be coming in then, and not 
 stand there framed in the doorway, gawk- 
 ing like a fool at a miracle." 
 
 "I'll sail across if you'll get a canal boat 
 or a raft," said he, "or, if the children are 
 kept out of sight, I'll strip, ma'm, and swim 
 for it." 
 
 His wife regarded him with steady gloom. 
 
 "If you took the smallest interest in your 
 home," said she, "and were less set on gal- 
 livanting about the country, going to the 
 Lord knows where, with the Lord knows 
 who, you'd know that the children were 
 away in school at this hour. Nice indeed 
 
THREE ANGRY PEOPLE 107 
 
 the places you visit and the company you 
 keep, if the truth were known — ^walk across 
 it, man, and wipe your feet on the kitchen 
 mat." 
 
 So he walked into the kitchen, and sat 
 down, and, as he sat, the last remnants of 
 his courage trembled down into his boots and 
 evaporated. 
 
 His wife came in after him — she drooped 
 a speculative eye on her lord — 
 
 "You didn't say what brought you home 
 so early," said she. 
 
 When a hard thing has to be done the 
 quickest way is generally the best way. It 
 is like the morning bath — don't ruminate, 
 jump in, for the longer you wait the more 
 dubious you get, and the tub begins to look 
 arctic and repellent. 
 
 Some such philosophy as this dictated his 
 attitude. He lugged out his week's wages, 
 slapped it on the table, and said — 
 
 "I've got the sack." 
 
 Then he stretched his legs out, pushed his 
 fists deep into his trouser pockets, and 
 waited. 
 
 His wife sat down too, slowly and with 
 great care, and she stared in silence at her 
 husband — 
 
io8 HERE ARE LADIES 
 
 "Do you tell me you have lost your em- 
 ployment?" said she in a quiet voice. 
 
 "I do, then," said he. "I chucked it my- 
 self. I told old Whiskers that he .could go 
 and boil his job and his head together and 
 sell the soup for cat-lap." 
 
 "You threw up your situation yourself." 
 
 "You've got the truth of it, ma'm," he 
 rejoined. 
 
 "Maybe you'd be telling me what you did 
 the like of that for?" 
 
 "Because," said he, "I'm a man and not 
 a mouse. Because I don't want to be at the 
 beck and call of every dog and devil that has 
 a bit more money than I have — a man has 
 got to be a man sometimes," he growled. 
 
 "Sure, you're telling the truth," said his 
 wife, nodding her head at him. "A man 
 should be a man sometimes. It's the pity of 
 the world that he can't be a man always: 
 and, indeed, it's the hard thing for a woman 
 to tell herself that the man she has got isn't 
 a man at all, but a big fool with no more 
 wit than a boy." 
 
 Now this was the first time he had found 
 his wife take trouble lying down. As a rule 
 she was readier for a fight than he was. She 
 jumped into a row with the alacrity of a 
 
THREE ANGRY PEOPLE 109 
 
 dog: and the change worked on him. He 
 looked at her listless hands, and the sight 
 of those powerful organs hanging so power- 
 lessly wrought on him. Women often for- 
 get that their weakness is really their 
 strength. The weakest things in the world 
 are by a queer paradox always the strong- 
 est. The toughest stone will wear away un- 
 der the dropping of water, a mushroom will 
 lift a rock on its delicate head, a child will 
 make its father work for it. So the too 
 capable woman will always have a baby to 
 nurse, and that baby will be her husband. 
 If she buttress her womanhood too much 
 she saps his manhood. Let her love all she 
 can and never stint that blessing, but a 
 woman cannot often be obeyed and loved at 
 the same time. A man cannot obey a 
 woman constantly and retain his self-re- 
 spect : the muscles of his arms reproach him 
 if he does, and the man with his self-respect 
 gone is a man with a grudge, he will learn 
 to hate the agent who brought him low. A 
 day may come when he will rise and beat 
 her in self-defence, with his fists if he is 
 sufficiently brutalised, some subtler, but no 
 less efficient, weapon if his manhood re- 
 fuses to be degraded — and this was our case. 
 
no HERE ARE LADIES 
 
 His wife had grabbed the reins and driven 
 the matrimonial coach: driven it well, that 
 is true, but the driver, by right of prece- 
 dent, had sat by hurt and angry, and at last, 
 in an endeavour to prove his manhood 
 among men, he had damned his employer's 
 self and work, although in reality all his 
 fury was directed against the mother of his 
 children.. He threw up his work, and the 
 semi-conscious thought that went home with 
 him was — "Now she will be sorry. If she 
 must do everything let her earn the bread." 
 
 The woman knew what poverty meant, 
 and she had four young children. It was 
 the thought of these helpless ones crying 
 with hunger (she could hear them already, 
 her ears were dinned with their hungry 
 lamentation) that took the fibre out of her 
 arms, and left her without any fight. She 
 could only sit and look with wretched eyes 
 on the man whom she had been demoralis- 
 ing, and, for the first time since he knew 
 her, the tears came, and the poor woman 
 laid her head on the kitchen table and wept. 
 
 He was astonished, he was dismayed, but 
 he could not stand her tears : he ran to her 
 — the first time he ever did run to her — 
 
 "Sure, darling," said he, "is it crying you 
 
THREE ANGRY PEOPLE in 
 
 are? What would you be doing that for? 
 If I've lost one job I can get another. I'm 
 not afraid of work, and I know how to do 
 it. I'll get something to do at once, if it's 
 only wheeling a handcart, or selling cockles 
 in public-houses. Wisha, dry your eyes — 
 they're as pretty as they ever were," said he, 
 trying to look at them, while his wife, with 
 a strange shyness, would not let him see, for 
 she felt that there was a strange man with 
 her, some one she did not know. That was 
 a man's hand on her shoulder, and she had 
 never felt a man's hand before, as long as 
 she was married. 
 
 "I'll go out at once," said he, "and when 
 I come in to-night I'll have a job if I have 
 to bang it out of some one with a shovel." 
 
 He slapped on his hat, kicked the soap 
 out of the way, tramped through the water 
 on the floor, and when at the door he turned 
 again and came back to kiss his wife, a form 
 of caress which had long fallen into desue- 
 tude, and so, out into the street, a man 
 again. 
 
 When he had gone his wife returned to 
 her scrubbing, and, as she worked she 
 smiled at something she was remembering, 
 and, now and again, a bit of a song came 
 
112 HERE ARE LADIES 
 
 from lips that had scolded so much. Having 
 finished her work she spent nearly an hour 
 at the looking-glass doing up her hair 
 (grand hair it was, too) with her ears lis- 
 tening for a footstep. Now and again she 
 would run to the pot to see were the pota- 
 toes doing all right — "The children will be 
 in shortly," said she, "and hungry to the 
 bone, poor dears." 
 
 But she was not thinking of the children. 
 The warmth of a kiss was still on her lips. 
 Something in the back of her head was say- 
 ing — "He will do it again when he comes 
 in." 
 
 And the second honeymoon was pleas- 
 anter than the first. 
 
Ill 
 
 Sh^ was tall and angular. Her hair was 
 red, and scarce, and untidy. Her hands 
 were large and packed all over with knuckles 
 and her feet would have turned inwards at 
 the toes, only that she was aware of and 
 corrected their perversities. 
 
 She was sitting all alone, and did not look 
 up as I approached — 
 
 "Tell me," said I, "why you have sat for 
 more than an hour with your eyes fixed on 
 nothing, and your hands punching your 
 lap?" 
 
 She looked at me for a fleeting instant, 
 and then, looking away again, she began to 
 speak. — Her voice was pleasant enough, but 
 it was so strong that one fancied there were 
 bones in it — 
 
 "I do not dislike women," said she, "but 
 I think they seldom speak of anything worth 
 listening to, nor do they often do anything 
 worth looking at : they bore and depress me, 
 and men do not." 
 
 "3 
 
114 HERE ARE LADIES 
 
 "But," said I, "you have not explained 
 why you thump your lap with your fist?" 
 
 She proceeded — 
 
 "I do not hate women, nor do I love men. 
 It was only that I did not take much notice 
 of the one, and that I liked being with the 
 other, for, as things are, there is very little 
 life for a person except in thinking. AH our 
 actions are so cumbered by laws and cus- 
 toms that we cannot take a step beyond the 
 ordinary without finding ourselves either in 
 gaol or in Coventry." 
 
 Having said this, she raised her bleak 
 head and stared like an eagle across the 
 wastes. 
 
 After I had coughed twice I touched her 
 arm, and said — 
 
 "Yes?" 
 
 "One must live," said she quickly. "I do 
 not mean that we must eat and sleep — these 
 mechanical matters are settled for many of 
 us, but life consists in thinking,- and nothing 
 else, yet many people go from the cradle to 
 the grave without having lived differently 
 from animals. I do not want to be one of 
 them. Their whole theory of life is me- 
 chanical. They eat and drink. They in- 
 vite each other to their houses to eat and 
 
THREE ANGRY PEOPLE 115 
 
 drink, and they use such speech as they are 
 gifted with in discussing their food and 
 whatever other palpable occurrence may 
 have chanced to them in the day. It is a 
 step, perhaps, towards living, but it is still 
 only one step removed from stagnation. 
 They have some interest in an occurrence, 
 but how that occurrence happened, and what 
 will result from it does not exercise them in 
 the least, and these, which are knowledge 
 and prophecy, are the only interesting as- 
 pects of any event." 
 
 "But," said I, "you have not told me why 
 you sit for a full hour staring at vacancy, 
 and thumping on your knee with your 
 hand?" 
 
 She continued — 
 
 "Sometimes one meets certain people who 
 have sufficient of the divine ferment in their 
 heads to be called alive: they are almost 
 always men. We fly to them as to our own 
 people. We abase ourselves before them in 
 happy humility. We crave to be allowed to 
 live near them in order that we may be 
 assured that everything in the world is not 
 nonsense and machinery — and then, what 
 do we find — ?" 
 
ii6 HERE ARE LADIES 
 
 She paused, and turned a large fierce eye 
 upon me. 
 
 "I do not know," said I, and I endeav- 
 oured vainly to look everywhere but at her 
 eye. 
 
 "We find always that they are married," 
 said she, and, saying so, she lapsed again to 
 a tense and worried reflection. 
 
 "You have not told me," I insisted gently, 
 "why you peer earnestly into space, and 
 thump at intervals upon your knee with the 
 heel of your fist?" 
 
 "These men," said she sternly, "are sur- 
 rounded by their wives. They are in gaol 
 and their wives are their warders. You can- 
 not go to them without a permit. You may 
 not speak to them without a listener. You 
 may not arg^e with them for fear of raising 
 an alien and ridiculous hostility. Scarcely 
 can you even look at them without reproach. 
 — How then can we live, and how will the 
 torch of Hfe be kept alight?" 
 
 "I do not know," I murmured. 
 
 She turned her pale eye to me again. 
 
 "I am not beautiful," said she. 
 
 But there was just a tremor of doubt in 
 her voice, so that the apparent statement 
 
THREE ANGRY PEOPLE 117 
 
 became packed with curiosity, and had all 
 the quality of a question. 
 
 I did not shrug my shoulder nor raise an 
 eyebrow — 
 
 "You are very nice," I replied. 
 
 "I do not want to be beautiful," she con- 
 tinued severely. "Why should I? I have 
 no interest in such things. I am interested 
 only in living, and living is thinking; but I 
 demand access to my fellows who are alive. 
 Perhaps, I did not pay those others enough 
 attention. How could I? They cannot 
 think. They cannot speak. They make a 
 complicated verbal noise, but all I am able 
 to translate from it is, that a something 
 called lip-salve can be bought in some par- 
 ticular shop one penny cheaper than it can 
 in a certain other shop. They will twitter 
 for hours about the way a piece of ribbon 
 was stitched to a hat which they saw in a 
 tramcar. They agitate themselves wonder- 
 ing whether a muff should be this size or 
 that size? — I say, they depress me, and if I 
 do turn my back on them when men are 
 present I am only acting sensibly and justly. 
 Why cannot they twitter to each other and 
 let me and other people alone?" 
 
 She turned to me again — 
 
ii8 HERE ARE LADIES 
 
 "I do not know," said I meekly. 
 
 "And," she continued, "the power they 
 have; the amazing power they have to an- 
 noy other folk. All kinds of sly imperti- 
 nences, vulgar evasions, and sneering misun- 
 derstandings. Why should such women be 
 allowed to take men into their captivity, to 
 sequester, and gag, and restrain them from 
 those whom they would naturally be eager 
 to meet? 
 
 "What," she continued fiercely, "had my 
 hat to do with that woman, or my frock?" 
 
 I nodded slowly and grievously, and re- 
 peated — 
 
 "What indeed?" 
 
 "A hat," said she, "is something to cover 
 one's head from the rain, and a frock is 
 something to guard one's limbs from in- 
 clement weather. — To that extent I am in- 
 terested in these things : but they would put 
 a hat on my mind, and a black cloth on my 
 understanding." 
 
 We sat in silence for a little time, while 
 she surveyed the bleak horizon as an eagle 
 might. 
 
 "And when I call at their houses," said 
 she, "their servants say 'Not at home,' a lie. 
 
THREE ANGRY PEOPLE 119 
 
 you know, and they close their doors on me." 
 
 She was silent again — 
 
 "I do not know what to do," said she. 
 
 "Is that," said I, "the reason why you 
 beat your lap with your hand, and stare 
 abroad like a famished eagle?" 
 
 She turned quickly to me — 
 
 "What shall I do to open those doors?" 
 said she. 
 
 "If I happened to be you," I replied, "I 
 would cut off my hair, I'd buy a man's 
 clothes and wear them always, I'd call my- 
 self Harry or Tom; and then I'd go wher- 
 ever I pleased, and meet whoever I wanted 
 to meet? 
 
 She stared fixedly at herself in these gar- 
 ments, and under these denominations^ — 
 
 "They would know I was not a man," said 
 she gravely. 
 
 I looked at her figure — 
 
 "No person in the world would ever guess 
 it," said I. 
 
 She arose from her seat. She clutched 
 her reticule to her breast — 
 
 "I'll do it," said she, and she stalked 
 gauntly across the fields. 
 
THE THREEPENNY-PIECE 
 
THE THREEPENNY-PIECE 
 
 Wh^n Brien O'Brien died, people said that 
 it did not matter very much, because he 
 would have died young in any case. He 
 would have been hanged, or his head would 
 have been split in two halves with a hatchet, 
 or he would have tumbled down the cliff 
 when he was drunk and been smashed into 
 jelly. Something like that was due to him, 
 and everybody likes to see a man get what 
 he deserves to get. 
 
 But, as ethical writs cease to run when 
 a man is dead, the neighbours did not stay 
 away from his wake. They came, and they 
 said many mitigating things across the body 
 with the bandaged jaws and the sly grin, 
 aind they reminded each other of this and 
 that queer thing which he had done, for his 
 memory was crusted over with stories of 
 wild, laughable things, and other things 
 which were wild but not laughable. 
 
 Meanwhile, he was dead, and one was at 
 liberty to be a trifle sorry for him. Further, 
 123 
 
124 HERE ARE LADIES 
 
 he belonged to the O'Brien nation, a stock 
 to whom reverence was due. A stock not 
 easily forgotten. The historic memory 
 could reconstruct forgotten glories of sta- 
 tion and battle, of terrible villainy and ter- 
 rible saintliness, the pitiful, valorous, slow 
 descent to the degradation which was not 
 yet wholly victorious. A great stock! The 
 O'Neills remembered it. The O'Tools and 
 the MacSweeneys had stories by the hun- 
 dred of love and hate. The Burkes and the 
 Geraldines and the new strangers had mem- 
 ories also. 
 
 His family was left in the poorest way, 
 but they were used to that, for he had kept 
 them as poor as he left them, or found them, 
 for that matter. They had shaken hands 
 with Charity so often that they no longer 
 disliked the sallow- faced lady, and, so, cer- 
 tain small gifts made by the neighbours were 
 accepted, not very thankfully, but very read- 
 ily. These gifts were almost always in kind. 
 A few eggs. A bag of potatoes. A hand- 
 ful of meal. A couple of twists of tea- 
 such like. 
 
 One of the visitprs, however, moved by 
 an extraordinary dejection, slipped a silver 
 threepenny-piece into the hand of Brien's 
 
THE THREEPENNY-PIECE 125 
 
 little daughter, Sheila, aged four years, and 
 later on she did not like to ask for it back 
 again. 
 
 Little Sheila had been well trained by her 
 father. She knew exactly what should be 
 done with money, and so, when nobody was 
 looking, she tip-toed to the coffin and slipped 
 the threepenny-piece into Brien's hand. 
 That hand had never refused money when 
 it was alive, it did not reject it either when 
 it was dead. 
 
 They buried him the next day. 
 
 He was called up for judgment the day 
 after, and made his appearance with a mis- 
 cellaneous crowd of wretches, and there he 
 again received what was due to him. He 
 was removed protesting and struggling to 
 the place decreed. 
 
 "Down," said Rhadamanthus, pointing 
 with his great hand, and down he went. 
 
 In the struggle he dropped the threepenny- 
 piece, but he was so bustled and heated that 
 he did not observe his loss. He went down, 
 far down, out of sight, out of remembrance, 
 to a howling, black gulf with others of his 
 unseen kind. 
 
 A young seraph, named Cuchulain, chanc- 
 ing to pass that way shortly afterwards, saw 
 
126 HERE ARE LADIES 
 
 the threepenny-piece peeping brightly from 
 the rocks, and he picked it up. 
 
 He looked at it in astonishment. He 
 turned it over and over, this way and that 
 way. Examined it at the stretch of his arm, 
 and peered minutely at it from two inches 
 distance — 
 
 "I have never in my life seen anything 
 so beautifully wrought," said he, and, having 
 stowed it in his pouch along with some other 
 trinkets, he strolled homewards again 
 through the massy gates. 
 
 It was not long until Brien discovered his 
 loss, and, suddenly, through the black re- 
 gion, his voice went mounting and brawl- 
 ing. 
 
 "I have been robbed," he yelled. "I have 
 been robbed in heaven !" 
 
 Having begun to yell he did not stop. 
 Sometimes he was simply angry and made a 
 noise. Sometimes he became sarcastic and 
 would send his query swirling upwards — 
 
 "Who stole the threepenny-bit?" he 
 roared. He addressed the surrounding 
 black space — 
 
 "Who stole the last threepenny-bit of a 
 poor man?" 
 
 Again and again his voice pealed up- 
 
THE THREEPENNY-PIECE 127 
 
 wards. The pains of his habitation lost all 
 their sting for him. His mind had nourish- 
 ment and the heat within him vanquished the 
 fumes without. He had a grievance, a 
 righteous cause, he was buoyed and 
 strengthened, nothing could silence him. 
 They tried ingenious devices, all kinds of 
 complicated things, but he paid no heed, and 
 the tormentors were in despair. 
 
 "I hate these sinners from the kingdom 
 of Kerry," said the Chief Tormentor, and 
 he sat moodily down on his own circular 
 saw; and that worried him also, for he was 
 clad only in a loin cloth. 
 
 "I hate the entire Clan of the Gael," said 
 he; "why cannot they send them somewhere 
 else?" and then he started practising again 
 on Brien. 
 
 It was no use. Brien's query still blared 
 upwards like the sound of the great trump 
 itself. It wakened and rung the rocky cav- 
 erns, screamed through fissure and funnel, 
 and was battered and slung from pinnacle 
 to crag and up again. Worse ! his compan- 
 ions in doom became interested and took up 
 the cry, until at last the uproar became so 
 appalling that the Master himself could not 
 stand it. 
 
128 HERE ARE LADIES 
 
 "I have not had a wink of sleep for three 
 nights," said that harassed one, and he sent 
 a special embassy to the powers. 
 
 Rhadamanthus was astonished when they 
 arrived. His elbow was leaning on his vast 
 knee, and his heavy head rested on a hand 
 that was acres long, acres wide. 
 
 "What is all this about?" said he. 
 
 "The Master cannot go to sleep," said the 
 spokesman of the embassy, and he grinned 
 as he said it, for it sounded queer even to 
 himself. 
 
 "It is not necessary that he should sleep," 
 said Rhadamanthus. "I have never slept 
 since time began, and I will never sleep until 
 time is over. But the complaint is curious. 
 What has troubled your master ?" 
 
 "Hell is turned upside down and inside 
 out," said the fiend. "The tormentors are 
 weeping like little children. The principali- 
 ties are squatting on their hunkers doing 
 nothing. The orders are running here and 
 there fighting each other. The styles are 
 leaning against walls shrugging their shoul- 
 ders, and the damned are shouting and 
 laughing and have become callous to tor- 
 ment." 
 
 "It is not my business," said the judge. 
 
THE THREEPENNY-PIECE 129 
 
 "The sinners demand justice," said the 
 spokesman. 
 
 "They've got it," said Rhadamanthus, 
 "let them stew in it." 
 
 "They refuse to stew," replied the spokes- 
 man, wringing his hands. 
 
 Rhadamanthus sat up. 
 
 "It is an axiom in law," said he, "that 
 however complicated an event may be, there 
 can never be more than one person at the ex- 
 treme bottom of it. Who is the person?" 
 
 "It is one Brien of the O'Brien nation, 
 late of the kingdom of Kerry. A bad one! 
 He got the maximum punishment a week 
 ago." 
 
 For the first time in his life Rhadaman- 
 thus was disturbed. He scratched his head, 
 and it was the first time he had ever done 
 that either. 
 
 "You say he got the maximum," said 
 Rhadamanthus, "then it's a fix! I have 
 damned him for ever, and better or worse 
 than that cannot be done. It is none of my 
 business," said he angrily, and he had the 
 deputation removed by force. 
 
 But that did not ease the trouble. The 
 contagion spread until ten million billions of 
 voices were chanting in unison, and un- 
 
I30 HERE ARE LADIES 
 
 countable multitudes were listening between 
 their pangs. 
 
 "Who stole the threepenny-bit? Who 
 stole the threepenny-bit?" 
 
 That was still their cry. Heaven rang 
 with it as well as hell. Space was filled with 
 that rhythmic tumult. Chaos and empty 
 Nox had a new discord added to their ele- 
 mental throes. Another memorial was 
 drafted below, showing that unless the miss- 
 ing coin was restored to its owner hell would 
 have to close its doors. There was a veiled 
 menace in the memorial also, for Clause 6 
 hinted that if hell was allowed, to go by the 
 board heaven might find itself in some jeop- 
 ardy thereafter. 
 
 The document was dispatched and con- 
 sidered. In consequence a proclamation was 
 sent through all the wards of Paradise, call- 
 ing on whatever person, archangel, seraph, 
 cherub, or acolyte had found a threepenny- 
 piece since midday of the tenth of August 
 then instant, that the same person, arch- 
 angel, seraph, cherub, or acolyte, should de- 
 liver the said threepenny-piece to Rhada- 
 manthus at his Court, and should receive in 
 return a free pardon and a receipt. 
 
 The coin was not delivered. 
 
THE THREEPENNY-PIECE 131 
 
 That young seraph, Cuchulain, walked 
 about like a person who was strange to him- 
 self. He was not tormented : he was angry. 
 He frowned, he cogitated and fumed. He 
 drew one golden curl through his fingers 
 until it was lank and drooping; save the end 
 only, that was still a ripple of gold. He put 
 the end in his mouth and strode moodily 
 chewing it. And every day his feet turned 
 in the same direction — down the long en- 
 trance boulevard, through the mighty gates, 
 along the strip of carved slabs, to that piled 
 wilderness where Rhadamanthus sat monu- 
 mentally. 
 
 Here delicately he went, sometimes with 
 a hand outstretched to help his foothold, 
 standing for a space to think ere he jumped 
 to a further rock, balancing himself for a 
 moment ere he leaped again. So he would 
 come to stand and stare gloomily upon the 
 judge. 
 
 He would salute gravely, as was meet, and 
 say, "God bless the work" ; but Rhadaman- 
 thus never replied, save by a nod, for he was 
 very busy. 
 
 Yet the judge did observe him, and would 
 sometimes heave ponderous lids to where he 
 stood, and so, for a few seconds, they re- 
 
132 HERE ARE LADIES 
 
 garded each other in an interval of that 
 unceasing business. 
 
 Sometimes for a minute or two the young 
 seraph Cuchulain would look from the judge 
 to the judged as they crouched back or 
 strained' forward, the good and the bad all | 
 in the same tremble of fear, all unknowing: 
 which way their doom might lead. They did ' 
 not look at each other. They looked at the ' 
 judge high on his ebon throne, and theyj 
 could not look away from him. There were 
 those who knew, guessed clearly their doom ; 
 abashed and flaccid they sat, quaking. There 
 were some who were uncertain — rabbit-eyed 
 these, not less quaking than the others, bit- 
 ing at their knuckles as they peeped up- 
 wards. There were those hopeful, yet 
 searching fearfully backwards in the wil- 
 derness of memory, chasing and weighing 
 their sins; and these last, even when their 
 bliss was sealed and their steps set on an 
 easy path, went faltering, not daring to look 
 around again, their ears strained to catch a 
 — "Halt, miscreant ! this other is your way !" 
 
 So, day by day, he went to stand near the 
 judge; and one day Rhadamanthus, looking 
 on him more intently, lifted his great hand 
 and pointed — 
 
THE THREEPENNY-PIECE 133 
 
 "Go you among those to be judged," said 
 he. 
 
 For Rhadamanthus knew. It was his 
 business to look deep into the heart and the 
 mind, to fish for secrets in the pools of 
 being. 
 
 And the young seraph Cuchulain, still 
 rolling his golden curl between his lips, went 
 obediently forward and set down his nod- 
 ding plumes between two who whimpered 
 and stared and quaked. 
 
 When his turn came, Rhadamanthus eyed 
 him intently for a long time — 
 
 "Well!" said Rhadamanthus. 
 
 The young seraph Cuchulain blew the curl 
 of gold away from his mouth — 
 
 "Findings are keepings," said he loudly, 
 and he closed his mouth and stared very im- 
 pertinently at the judge. 
 
 "It is to be given up," said the judge. 
 
 "Let them come and take it from me," said 
 the seraph Cuchulain. And suddenly (for 
 these things are at the will of spirits) 
 around his head the lightnings span, and his 
 hands were on the necks of thunders. 
 
 For the second time in his life Rhada- 
 manthus was disturbed, again he scratched 
 his head — 
 
134 HERE ARE LADIES 
 
 "It's a fix," said he moodily. But in a 
 moment he called to those whose duty it 
 was — 
 
 "Take him to this side," he roared. 
 
 And they advanced. But the seraph 
 Cuchulain swung to meet them, and his 
 golden hair blazed and shrieked; and the 
 thunders rolled at his feet, and about him a 
 bright network that hissed and stung — and 
 those who advanced turned haltingly back- 
 wards and ran screaming. 
 
 "It's a fix," said Rhadamanthus ; and for 
 a little time he stared menacingly at the 
 seraph Cuchulain. 
 
 But only for a little time. Suddenly he 
 put his hands on the rests of his throne and 
 heaved upwards his terrific bulk. Never 
 before had Rhadamanthus stood from his 
 ordained chair. He strode mightily for- 
 ward and in an instant had quelled that 
 rebel. The thunders and lightnings were 
 but moonbeams and dew on that stony car- 
 cass. He seized the seraph Cuchulain, 
 lifted him to his breast as one lifts a spar- 
 row, and tramped back with him — 
 
 "Fetch me that other," said he, sternly, 
 and he sat down. 
 
 Those whose duty it was sped swiftly 
 
THE THREEPENNY-PIECE 135 
 
 downwards to find Brien of the O'Brien na- 
 tion; and while they were gone, all in vain 
 the seraph Cuchulain crushed flamy barbs 
 against that bosom of doom. Now, indeed, 
 his golden locks were drooping and his 
 plumes were broken and tossed; but his 
 fierce eye still glared courageously against 
 the nipple of Rhadamanthus. 
 
 Soon they brought Brien. He was a sight 
 of woe — ^howling, naked as a tree in winter, 
 black as a tarred wall, carved and gashed, 
 tattered in all but his throat, wherewith, un- 
 til one's ears rebelled, he bawled his one de- 
 mand. 
 
 But the sudden light struck him to a won- 
 dering silence, and the sight of the judge 
 holding the seraph Cuchulain like a limp 
 flower to his breast held him p^aping — 
 
 "Bring him here," said Rhadamanthus. 
 
 And they brought him to the steps of the 
 throne — 
 
 "You have lost a medal!" said Rhada- 
 manthus. "This one has it." 
 
 Brien looked straitly at the seraph Cuchu- 
 lain. 
 
 Rhadamanthus stood again, whirled his 
 arm in an epormous arc, jerked, and let go, 
 
136 HERE ARE LADIES 
 
 and the seraph Cuchulain went swirling 
 through space like a slung stone — 
 
 "Go after him, Kerryman," said Rhada- 
 manthus, stooping; and he seized Brien by 
 the leg, whirled him wide and out and far ; 
 dizzy, dizzy as a swooping comet, and down, 
 and down, and down. 
 
 Rhadamanthus seated hiniself. He mo- 
 tioned with his hand — 
 
 "Next," said he, coldly. 
 
 Down went the seraph Cuchulain, swirl- 
 ing in wide tumbles, scarcely visible for 
 quickness. Sometimes, with outstretched 
 hands, he was a cross that dropped plumb. 
 Anon, head urgently downwards, he dived 
 steeply. Again, like a living hoop, head and 
 heels together, he spun giddily. Blind, deaf, 
 dumb, breathless, mindless; and behind 
 him Brien of the O'Brien nation came pelt- 
 ing and whizzing. 
 
 What of that journey! Who could give 
 it words? Of the suns that appeared and 
 disappeared like winking eyes. Comets that 
 shone for an instant, went black and van- 
 ished. Moons that came, and stood, and 
 were gone. And around all, including all. 
 
THE THREEPENNY-PIECE 137 
 
 boundless space, boundless silence; the black, 
 unmoving void — the deep, unending quiet- 
 ude, through which they fell with Saturn 
 and Orion, and mildly-smiling Venus, and 
 the fair, stark-naked moon and the decent 
 earth wreathed in pearl and blue. From 
 afar she appeared, the quiet one, all lonely 
 in the void. As sudden as a fair face in a 
 crowded street. Beautiful as the sound of 
 falling waters. Beautiful as the sound of 
 music in a silence. Like a white sail on a 
 windy sea. Like a green tree in a solitary 
 place. Chaste and wonderful she was. Fly- 
 ing afar. Flying aloft like a joyous bird 
 when the morning breaks on the darkness 
 and he shrills sweet tidings. She soared and 
 sang. Gently she sang to timid pipes and 
 flutes of tender straw and murmuring, dis- 
 stant strings. A song that grew and 
 swelled, gathering to a multitudinous, deep- 
 thundered harmony, until the over-bur- 
 dened ear failed before the appalling up- 
 roar of her ecstasy, and denounced her. No 
 longer a star ! No longer a bird ! A plumed 
 and horned fury! Gigantic, gigantic, leap- 
 ing and shrieking tempestuously, spouting 
 whirlwinds of lightning, tearing glutton- 
 
138 HERE ARE LADIES 
 
 ously along her path, avid, rampant, howl- 
 ing with rage and terror she leaped, dread- 
 fully she leaped and flew. . . . 
 
 Enough ! They hit the earth — they were 
 not smashed, there was that virtue in them. 
 They hit the ground just outside the village 
 of Donnybrook where the back road runs to 
 the hills; and scarcely had they bumped 
 twice when Brien of the O'Brien nation had 
 the seraph Cuchulain by the throat — 
 
 "My threepenny-bit," he roared, with one 
 fist up — 
 
 But the seraph Cuchulain only laughed — 
 
 "That!" said he. "Look at me, man. 
 Your little medal dropped far beyond the 
 rings of Saturn." 
 
 And Brien stood back looking at him — 
 He was as naked as Brien was. He was as 
 naked as a stone, or an eel, or a pot, or a 
 new-born babe. He was very naked. 
 
 So Brien of the O'Brien nation strode 
 across the path and sat down by the side of 
 a hedge — 
 
 "The first man that passes this way," said 
 he, "will give me his clothes, or I'll strangle 
 him." 
 
THE THREEPENNY-PIECE 139 
 
 The seraph Cuchulain walked over to 
 him — 
 
 "I will take the clothes of the second man 
 that passes," said he, and he sat down. 
 
BRIGID 
 
 (after the Irish) 
 
 Do not marry, Breed, asthore! 
 That old man whose head is hoar 
 As the winter, but instead 
 Mate with some young curly-head: 
 He will give to you a child. 
 He will never leave your side. 
 And at morning when you wake 
 Kiss for kiss will give and take. 
 
 I wish that I had died, I do, 
 Before I gave my love to you; 
 Love so lasting that it will 
 While I live be with you still : 
 And for it what do I get? 
 Pain and trouble and regret. 
 The terrors of the aspen-tree 
 Which the wind shakes fearfully. 
 
 If this country could be seen 
 As it ought — then you had been 
 Living in a castle grand 
 With the ladies of the land : 
 
 141 
 
142 HERE ARE LADIES 
 
 The friend and foe, the gael and gall. 
 Would be cheering, one and all. 
 For yourself, and, this is true, 
 I would be along with you. 
 
 You promised, 'twas a lie, I see. 
 When you said you'd come to me 
 At the sheep-cote; I was there. 
 And I whistled on the air. 
 And I gave our settled call — 
 But you were not there at all ! 
 There was nothing anywhere 
 But lambs and birds and sunny air 
 
 When it is dark you pass me by, 
 And when the sun is in the sky 
 You pass me also — night or day 
 You look away, you walk away! 
 But if you would come to me. 
 And say the word of courtesy, 
 I would close the door, and then 
 I'd never let you out again. 
 
 But do not marry, Breed, asthore! 
 That old man; his heart is hoar 
 As his head is: you can see 
 Winter gripping at his knee : 
 His eyes and ears are blear and dim, 
 How can you expect of him 
 To see or hear or pleasure you 
 Half as well as I would do? 
 
THREE YOUNG WIVES 
 
THREE YOUNG WIVES 
 
 She was about to be a mother for the sec- 
 ond time, and the fear which is the portion 
 of women was upon her. In a Uttle while 
 she would be in the toils, and she hated and 
 feared physical pain with a great hatred and 
 a great fear. But there was something 
 further which distressed her. 
 
 She was a soft, babyish creature, downy 
 and clinging, soft-eyed and gentle, the beg- 
 gar folk had received gifts at her hand, the 
 dogs knew of her largesse. Men looked on 
 her with approval, and women liked her. 
 Her husband belonged to the type known as 
 "fine men," tall, generously-proportioned, 
 with the free and easy joviality which is so 
 common in Ireland. He was born a boy and 
 he would never grow out of that state. The 
 colour of his hair or the wrinkles on his 
 cheek would not have anything to do with 
 his age, for time was powerless against the 
 145 
 
146 HERE ARE LADIES 
 
 richness of his blood. He would still be a 
 boy when he was dying of old age; but if 
 protestations, kisses and homage were any 
 criterion then the fact that he loved his wife 
 was fixed beyond any kind of doubt. 
 
 But he did not love her. — He was as 
 changeable as the weather of his country. 
 Swift to love he was equally swift to forget. 
 His passions were of primitive intensity, but 
 they were not steadfast. He clutched with 
 both hands at the present and was surprised 
 and irritated by the fact that he could in 
 nowise get away from the past: the future 
 he did not care a rap about. Nobody does : 
 there is, indeed, no such thing as the future, 
 there is only the possibility of it, but the past 
 and the present are facts not to be gotten 
 away from. What we have done and what 
 we are doing are things which stamp us, 
 mould us, live with us and after us: what 
 we will do cannot be counted on, has no part 
 in us, has only a problematical existence, and 
 can be interfered with, hindered, nullified or 
 amplified by the thousand unmanageable 
 accidents of futurity. 
 
 He had married thanking God from a full 
 heart for His goodness, and believing im- 
 plicitly that he had plucked the very Flower 
 
THREE YOUNG WIVES i47 
 
 of Womanhood, and the Heart of the World, 
 and, maybe, he had. — There are many Flow- 
 ers of Womanhood, all equally fragrant, 
 and the Heart of the World can beat against 
 the breast of any man who loves a woman. 
 
 Some time previously their little boy had 
 contracted small-pox, and his mother, nurs- 
 ing him, took it from him. When they re- 
 covered her beauty was gone. The extraor- 
 dinary bloom which had made her cheek a 
 shrine to worship and marvel at was de- 
 stroyed for ever, while, by a curious chance, 
 the boy was unmarked. 
 
 Now the only love which he had to give 
 was a physical love. He did not love a 
 woman, he loved the husk. Of the woman 
 herself he knew nothing and cared less. He 
 had never sought to know his wife, never 
 tried to pierce beneath her beauty and dis- 
 cover where the woman lived and what she 
 was like at home. Indeed, he knew less of 
 his wife than his servants did, and by little 
 and little she had seen how the matter stood. 
 She had plucked the heart from his mystery 
 and read him to the bones, while remaining 
 herself intact. But she held him still, 
 although by the most primitive and fragile 
 of bonds, by the magnetism of her body, the 
 
148 HERE ARE LADIES 
 
 shining of her eyes, the soft beauty of her 
 cheeks; and, behold! she was undone. The 
 disease had stamped on her face, and, in 
 the recoil, had stamped on her husband's 
 love. 
 
 How many nights of solitary tears she 
 had known! she alone could count them, a 
 heavy knowledge. How many slights, 
 shrinkings, coldnesses she had discerned! 
 the tale of them was hot in her brain, the 
 index heavy on her heart. 
 
 She knew her loss on the day that her 
 husband looked at her after her recovery 
 when all fear of infection had passed — the 
 stare, the flush, the angry disgust. Her eyes 
 were cameras. She had only to close them 
 and she could see again in dismal procession 
 those dismal details. 
 
 And now, as she lay helpless on the bed, 
 she watched him. She was racked with pain, 
 and he was mumbling that it would be all 
 right again in a little time. "A week from 
 now," said he, "and you will have forgot- 
 ten all about it." 
 
 But she, looking at him with fearful eyes, 
 traced this sentence at the back of his brain, 
 "I hope that she will die," and the life within 
 her which had been sown in happiness and 
 
THREE YOUNG WIVES i49 
 
 love, and had grown great through misery 
 and tears was now beating at the gates of 
 entrance. . . . She might die: so many 
 people die in labour, and she was not strong. 
 With a new clairvoyant gaze she saw Death 
 standing by the bed, hooded, cloaked and 
 sombre ; his eyes were fixed on her and they 
 were peaceful and kindly eyes. Had there 
 been nothing else to care for she would have 
 gone gladly to the Dark One; but there re- 
 mained her little son. What heart was he 
 to rest on when she was gone ? Whose arms 
 could open so widely as the mother's when 
 he fled from the terrible things which haunt 
 Babyland? — it was an arrow in her heart. 
 
 She knew well that her husband would 
 marry again. He was of those men who are 
 inveterate husbands — and that new woman ! 
 — Who was she? What was she like? What 
 would be her attitude towards a motherless 
 child? towards her little one? She would 
 be kindly at first, little doubt of that, but 
 afterwards, when her own children came, 
 what would become of the child of a hus- 
 band's first wife? . . . 
 
 She stared down vistas of sorrow. She 
 was a woman, and she knew women. She 
 saw the other little ones, strangers to her, 
 
150 HERE ARE LADIES 
 
 cared for and loved, all their childish trou- 
 bles the centre of maternal interest and de- 
 bate, while her boy slunk through a lonely, 
 pathetic childhood, frightened, repressed, 
 perhaps beaten, because he was not of the 
 brood. . . . 
 
 She saw these things as she lay looking at 
 her husband, and she believed they would 
 come to pass if she died. 
 
 And in the night time, when the stars were 
 hidden behind the window curtains, by the 
 light of a lamp that fell on toiling, anxious 
 people, in a hospital-like atmosphere of pain 
 and clamour she did die. 
 
II 
 
 It was believed long ago in the ancient 
 kingdom of Erinn that it was death to be a 
 poet, death to love a poet, and death to 
 mock a poet. So the Gael said, and, in 
 that distant time, the people of the Gael 
 were a wise people, holding the ancient 
 knowledge, and they honoured the poet 
 and feared him, for his fostering was among 
 the people of the Shee, and his curse was 
 quickened with the authority of the gods. 
 Even lately the people feared the poets and 
 did them reverence, although the New Ig- 
 norance (known humorously as Education) 
 was gradually strangling the life out of 
 Wisdom, and was setting up a different and 
 debased standard of mental values. There 
 was a lady once and she scorned a poet, wit- 
 tingly and with malice, and it was ill for 
 her in the sequel, for the gods saw to it. 
 
 She was very beautiful — "The finest girl 
 in three counties, sir," said her father: but 
 151 
 
152 HERE ARE LADIES 
 
 he might have been prejudiced in favour of 
 his own, and he had been known to speak of 
 himself as "the finest man in Ireland, and 
 you know what that means, sir." Further, 
 his dog was "the greatest dog that ever 
 ratted in the universe." Whatever he owned 
 was not only good, it was great and unique, 
 and whatever he did not own had, in his 
 opinion, very little to recommend it. 
 
 But his daughter was beautiful. When 
 the male eye encountered her it was in no 
 haste to look away. When the female eye 
 lit on her it was, and the owner of the female 
 eye, having sniffed as was proper, went 
 home and tried to do up her hair or her com- 
 plexion in the like manner — as was also 
 proper. A great many people believe (and 
 who will quarrel with their verities) that 
 beauty is largely a matter of craft and ad- 
 justment. — Such women are beautiful with 
 a little difficulty — they pursue loveliness, run 
 it to earth in a shop, obtain it with a certain 
 amount of minted metal, and reincarnate 
 themselves from a box. — They deserve all 
 the success which they undoubtedly obtain. 
 There are other women who are beautiful 
 by accident — such as, the cunning dispo- 
 sition of a dimple, the abilities of a certain 
 
THREE YOUNG WIVES 153 
 
 kind of smile, the possession of a charming 
 voice — for, indeed, an ugly woman with a 
 beautiful voice is a beautiful woman. But 
 some women are beautiful through the 
 spendthrift generosity of nature, and of this 
 last was she. Whatever of colour, line, or 
 motion goes to the construction of beauty 
 that she was heiress to, and she knew it only 
 too well. 
 
 A person who has something of his own 
 making may properly be proud of his posses- 
 sion, even if it is nothing more than a stamp 
 album, but a person who has been gifted by 
 Providence or Fairy Godmothers should not 
 be conceited. A self-made man may be 
 proud of his money, but his son may not. 
 Pride in what has been given freely to you 
 is an empty pride, and she was prouder of 
 her beauty than a poet is of his odes — it was 
 her undoing in the end. 
 
 She was so accustomed to the homage of 
 men that one who failed to make instant and 
 humble obeisance to her proved himself to 
 be either a very vulgar person or else a 
 miracle. Such folk were few, for the aver- 
 age man bends as readily to beauty as a 
 flower sways to the wind, or the sea to the 
 touch of the moon. 
 
154 HERE ARE LADIES 
 
 Before she was twenty years of age she 
 had loomed in the eye of every male in her 
 vicinity as the special female whom nature 
 had built to his exclusive measure. When 
 she was twenty-one she had withstood the 
 matrimonial threats of half the male popu- 
 lation of Ireland, and she knew how every 
 social grade (there are not many of them) of 
 Irish life made love, for that was the only 
 thing they were able to. do while they were 
 near her. From the farmer with a spade in 
 his fist to the landlord with a writ in his 
 agent's pocket, all sang the same song, the 
 sole difference being a matter of grammar; 
 and, although young women have big appe- 
 tites in these cases, and great recuperative 
 powers, she was as tired of love and love- 
 lorn swains as a young and healthy woman 
 can be, and then, suddenly, and to her own 
 delighted consternation, she did fall in love. 
 
 The tantalising part of the whole matter 
 was that she was unable to formulate any 
 good reason for falling in love with this 
 particular male. Her powers of observation 
 (and they were as sharp as a cat's tooth) 
 pointed out that although he was a young 
 man his head was beginning to push out 
 through his hair, and she had always con- 
 
THREE YOUNG WIVES i55 
 
 sidered that a bald man was outside the pale 
 of human interest. Furthermore, his trou- 
 sers bagged at the knees, perhaps the most 
 lamentable mishap that can descend on 
 manly apparel. — They were often a little 
 jagged at the ends. She did not understand 
 that trousers such as these were the correct 
 usage, they were in the tradition: he was 
 wearing "the bearded breeches of the bard." 
 He was a little weak on his legs, and his 
 hands sometimes got in his own way, but 
 she said to herself with a smile, "How dif- 
 ferent he is from other men!" 
 
 What that difference consisted in got be- 
 tween her and her rest, there was a crumb 
 in her bed on the head of it. 
 
 Meanwhile, he had not told her that he 
 loved her, and she was strangely anxious 
 for news to that effect. Indeed, she sought 
 confirmation of her hopes as often as maid- 
 enly modesty permitted, which was pretty 
 frequent, for maidenly modesty has its di- 
 plomacy also; besides, has not a reigning 
 beauty liberty to pay court? — there are 
 plenty of other queens who have done it. 
 
 He was a poet by profession, but his live- 
 lihood depended upon his ability as a bar- 
 rister. When she first saw him he was cross- 
 
156 HERE ARE LADIES 
 
 ing a street. Suddenly, in the centre of the 
 road, he halted, with his toes turned in, his 
 fingers caressing his chin, and an expression 
 of rapt and abstracted melancholy on his 
 visage, while he sought for the missing, the 
 transfiguring word. There was a sonnet in 
 his eye and it impeded his vision. Mean- 
 while, the wheeled traffic of the street ad- 
 dressed language to him which was so vigor- 
 ous as almost to be poetical. She had pulled 
 him from beneath a horse's head which a 
 frantic driver was endeavouring to pull the 
 mouth from. The words of the driver as he 
 sailed away were — "Go home and die, you 
 moonstruck, gibbering, wobbling omad- 
 haun," and she had thought that his descrip- 
 tion was apt and eloquent. 
 
 She saw him a second time, when her 
 father took her for a visit to the Four 
 Courts. He was addressing the Court, and, 
 while his language was magnificent, the 
 judge must have considered that his law was 
 on vacation, for he lost his cause. 
 
 They met again in her own home. Her 
 father knew him very well, and, although 
 they seldom met, he had that strong admira- 
 tion for him which a vigorous and overbear- 
 
THREE YOUNG WIVES i57 
 
 ing personality sometimes extends to a shy 
 and unworldly friend — 
 
 "A perfect frost as a lawyer," he used to 
 say, "but as a poet, sir, Shakespeare is an 
 ass beside him, and if any one asks you who 
 said so, tell them that I did, sir." 
 
 He sat beside her at dinner and forgot 
 her before the first course was removed, 
 and, later, when he knocked a glass off the 
 table, he looked at her as though she were 
 responsible for the debris. 
 
 He did not make love to her, a new and 
 remarkable omission in her experience of 
 men, however bald, and while this was re- 
 freshing for a time it became intolerable 
 shortly. She challenged* him, as a woman 
 can, with the flash of her eyes, the quick 
 music of her laugh, but he was marvelling 
 at the width of the horizon, rapt in contem- 
 plation of the distant mountains, observing 
 how a flower poised and nodded on its stalk, 
 following the long, swooping flight of a bird 
 or watching how the moon tramped down on 
 the stars. So far as she could see he was 
 unaware that her charms were of other than 
 average significance — 
 
 "These poets are awful fools," said she 
 angrily. 
 
158 HERE ARE LADIES 
 
 But the task of awakening this landlocked 
 nature was one which presented many in- 
 teresting features to her. She was really 
 jealous that he paid her no attention, and, 
 being accustomed to the homage of every 
 male thing over fifteen years of age, she 
 resented his negligence, became interested in 
 him, as every one is in the abnormal, and 
 when a woman becomes interested in a man 
 she is unhappy until he becomes interested 
 in her. 
 
 There had arrived, with the express in- 
 tention of asking her to marry him, another 
 young gentleman. He had a light mous- 
 tache and a fancy waistcoat, both of which 
 looked new. He was young, rich, hand- 
 some, and sufficiently silly to make any 
 woman wish to take charge of him, and her 
 father had told him to "go in and win, my 
 boy, there's no one I'd like better, sir," a 
 very good heartener for a slightly dubious 
 youth, even though he may consider that the 
 lady of his choice is watching another man 
 more intently than is pleasant. 
 
 The young gentleman gripped, with care- 
 ful frenzy, at his light, new moustache, and 
 growled as he watched the stalking. But 
 the poet was occupied and careless, and 
 
THREE YOUNG WIVES 159 
 
 then, suddenly, it happened. What move- 
 ment, conscious or unconscious, opened his 
 eyes one cannot say : the thing seemed to be 
 done without any preliminaries, and he was 
 awakened and in the toils. 
 
 They had been reading poetry together, 
 his poetry, and he was expressing, more to 
 himself than to her, how diflficult and how 
 delightful it was to work with entire satis- 
 faction within the "scanty plot" of a sonnet. 
 She was listening with bated breath, and an- 
 swering with an animation more than 
 slightly tinged with ignorance, for she was 
 as little interested in the making of sonnets 
 as in the making of shoes. — Nobody is inter- 
 ested in the making of sonnets, not even 
 poets. 
 
 He fell silent after a space and sat gazing 
 at the moon where it globed out on the still- 
 ness, and she also became silent. Her 
 nerves, she told herself, were out of order. 
 She was more used to dismissing than to 
 being dismissed and yet she seemed beaten. 
 There was nothing further that a girl could 
 do. He cared no more about her than he 
 did about whatever woman cleaned his 
 rooms. She was not angry, but a feeling of 
 weariness came upon her. (It is odd that 
 
i6o HERE ARE LADIES 
 
 one can be so in earnest when one is in jest.) 
 Once or twice she shook her head at the 
 moon, and as she stared, moody and quiet, 
 it seemed that the moon had sHd beyond her 
 vision and she was looking into great cav- 
 erns of space, bursting with blackness. 
 Some horror of emptiness was reaching to 
 roll her in pits of murk, where her screams 
 would be battered back on her tongue sound- 
 less. 
 
 With an effort she drew her eyes into 
 focus again and turned them, smiling bit- 
 terly, on her companion, and, lo, he was look- 
 ing at her with timid eyes, amazed eyes, and 
 they spoke, for all their timidity, louder than 
 trumpets. She knew that look, who could 
 mistake it? Here was flame from the au- 
 thentic fire. He was silent, but his breath 
 came and went hurriedly, and he was bend- 
 ing towards her, little by little he was bend- 
 ing, his eyes, his whole body and soul 
 yearning. 
 
 Then she arose 
 
 "It is getting a little cold," said she : "we 
 had better go in." 
 
 They went indoors silently. He was walk- 
 ing like a man just awakened from a dream. 
 While she! — her head was high. Where 
 
THREE YOUNG WIVES i6i 
 
 was her equal ! She frowned in the face of 
 the moon and stars. She beat her small feet 
 upon the earth and called it slave. She had 
 torn victory from nowhere. A man's head 
 swung at her girdle and she owned the blood 
 that dripped, and her heart tossed rapture 
 and anthem, carol and paean to the air 
 around. — She had her hour. 
 
 That night the other young gentleman 
 whom any woman would like to take charge 
 of asked her to be his wife, and she con- 
 sented gracefully, slightly disarranging his 
 nice, new moustache in the act of surrender. 
 
 The next day the poet left the house 
 pleading urgent briefs as an excuse — 
 
 "You'll come to the wedding," cried her 
 father, "or," laughing, "maybe, you'll help 
 us with the settlements, that's more in your 
 line," and he put an arm fondly about his 
 daughter. She, regarding their visitor, 
 nestled to him and laughingly said — 
 
 "It would not be like my wedding at all 
 if you stayed away. You must write me an 
 ode," and her eyes mocked him. 
 
 He stood, looking at her for a moment, 
 and his eyes mocked also, for the poet knew 
 by his gift what she had done, and he re- 
 plied with careless scorn — 
 
i62 HERE ARE LADIES 
 
 "I will come with pleasure, and," with an 
 emphasis she noted, "I will dance at your 
 wedding." So he laughed and marched away 
 heart-whole. 
 
 Then, disengaging her arm from her 
 father's, she smiled and walked slowly in- 
 doors, and as she walked there spread over 
 her body a fierce coldness, and when her 
 husband sought her afterwards that wintry 
 breast chilled him, and he died : but the poet 
 danced at her wedding, when her eyes were 
 timid and pleading, and frightened. 
 
Ill 
 
 She read the letter through twice, and then 
 she stood for a few minutes looking in front 
 of her, with her arms hanging loosely by her 
 sides, and her foot tapping on the carpet. 
 She was looking into the future with the 
 thoughtful gaze of one who has cut ofif all 
 communication with the past, and, with a 
 strange feeling of detachment, she was won- 
 dering how that future would reveal itself, 
 and whether he. . . ? She crossed to the 
 fireplace, sat down, and read the letter over 
 again. 
 
 Her husband had gone out that evening 
 with a friend. In his usual hit-or-miss fash- 
 ion, he kissed his wife and asked her to settle 
 his tie. He was always asking her to do 
 something, but he never did anything for 
 her. — It was, "Will you hand me the paper, 
 like a good girl?" and, "I say, dear, my pipe 
 is stuffed, you might stick a hairpin through 
 it," or, "You might see, old lady, if there is 
 a match anywhere." Before their marriage 
 163 
 
i64 HERE ARE LADIES 
 
 she had been accustomed to men who did 
 things for her, and the change was sudden : 
 Hkeable enough at first — 
 
 . . . How red the fire is to-night! They 
 must be sending better coal than we usually 
 get — there is not a single dark spot in it, and 
 how the shape continually changes ! Now it 
 is a deep cave with stalactites hanging from 
 the roof, and little swelling hillocks on the 
 floor, and, over all, a delicate, golden glow 
 surging and fading. The blue flame on the 
 top that flits and flickers like a will-o'-the- 
 wisp is gas, I suppose — I wonder how they 
 extract it. ... I wonder will he be sorry 
 when he comes home, and finds. . . . Per- 
 haps his friend will be sufficient for him then. 
 ... It is curious to think of oneself as a 
 piece of animated furniture, a dumb waiter, 
 always ready when required, and decently 
 out of sight when not wanted — not dumb, 
 though ! He cannot say I failed to talk about 
 it: but, of course, that is nagging and bad 
 temper, and "making yourself ridiculous for 
 nothing, my dear." Nothing ! I warned him 
 over and over again ; but he must have com- 
 pany. He would be stifled unless he went 
 among men now and again — "Male company 
 
THREE YOUNG WIVES 165 
 
 is a physical necessity for men, my dear." 
 I suppose women do not need any other 
 company than that of their husbands, and 
 they must not ask too much of that. . . . 
 What strange, careless, hopeful creatures 
 they are, and how they cease to value what 
 they have got! Does the value rise again 
 when it is gone, I wonder ? . . . Out all day, 
 and he cannot understand why I ask him to 
 stay with me at night. "A man wants air, 
 sweetheart." A woman does not, of course 
 — she would not have the cheek to want any- 
 thing: there is something not "nice" about a 
 woman wanting anything. Do all men stifle 
 in the air their wives have breathed? If I ask 
 him "do you love me still?" he replies, "of 
 course, do you mind if I run out for an hour 
 or two, dear." One will ask questions, of 
 course. ... A kiss in the morning, another 
 at night, and, for Heaven's sake, don't bother 
 me in the interval : that is marriage from a 
 man's point of view. Do they really believe 
 that women are alive ? Is matrimony always 
 a bondage to them? Are all women's lives 
 so lonely ? Are their wishes neglected, their 
 attempts to think laughed at, their pride 
 stricken? — I wonder. . . . And he did love 
 me, I know that: but if he has forgotten I 
 
i66 HERE ARE LADIES 
 
 must not remember it. He could not see 
 enough of me then : and the things he said, 
 and does not remember — I was a wonder 
 that the world could not equal — it is laugh- 
 able. — A look from me was joy, a word de- 
 light, a touch ecstasy. He would run to the 
 ends of the earth to gratify a whim of mine, 
 and life without me was not worth living. 
 ... If I would only love him! If I could 
 only bring myself to care for him a little — 
 he was too humble, too unworthy to imagine 
 — and so forth, and so forth ; and it was all 
 true then. Now I am some one who waits 
 upon him. He wants this and that, and asks 
 me for it. He has cut his finger and shouts 
 for me to bind it up, and I must be terribly 
 concerned about it; somehow, he will even 
 manage to blame me for his cut finger. He 
 cannot sleep in the night, so I must awaken 
 also and listen to his complaint. He is sick, 
 and the medicine tastes nasty ; I am to under- 
 stand that if the medicine tastes nasty I am 
 responsible for it — I should not have given 
 him anything nasty: he is surprised: he 
 trusted me not to do such a thing to him. 
 He turns to me like a child when he has any 
 ... he turns to me like a child and trusts 
 ... he turns to me . . . like a child . . . 
 
THREE YOUNG WIVES 167 
 
 The sound of a horse's hooves came to her, 
 and she arose from her chair with frightened 
 haste. She looked swiftly at the clock, and 
 then stood listening in a rigid attitude, with 
 a face that grew white and peaked, and 
 flushed and paled again. The car came 
 swiftly nearer andi stopped a little way from 
 the house. Then a foot crunched the gravel, 
 and her desperate eyes went roving quickly 
 about the room as though she were looking 
 for a place to hide in. Next, after a little 
 interval of silence, a pebble struck the win- 
 dow. She stood for a moment staring at 
 the window and then ran to it, swung open 
 a pane of glass, and, leaning out, she called 
 in a high, strained voice, "I will not go." 
 Then, closing the window again, she ran 
 back to the fireplace, crouched down on the 
 rug and pushed her fingers into her ears. 
 
 Her husband came home before eleven 
 o'clock, brushed the wraith of a kiss half an 
 inch from her lips, and asked was there any- 
 thing nice for supper? The supper things 
 were already on the table, and, after tasting 
 a mouthful — 
 
 "Who cooked this ?" said he. 
 
 She was watching him intently — 
 
 "The girl did," she replied. 
 
i68 HERE ARE LADIES 
 
 "I knew it," said he angrily, "it's beastly : 
 you might have done it yourself when you 
 were not busy; a lot you care about what I 
 like." 
 
 "I will do it to-morrow," she replied 
 quietly. 
 
 "Yes do," said he, "there is no one can 
 cook like you." 
 
 And she, still watching him intently, sud- 
 denly began to laugh — 
 
 He leaped up from the table and, after a 
 stare of indignant astonishment, he stalked 
 off to bed — 
 
 "You are always giggling about nothing," 
 said he, and he banged the door. 
 
THE HORSES 
 
THE HORSES 
 
 He was tall and she was short. He was 
 bulky, promising to be fat. She was thin, 
 and, with a paring here and there, would 
 have been skinny. His face was sternly reso- 
 lute, solemn indeed, hers was prim, and 
 primness is the most everlasting, indestruct- 
 ible trait of humanity. It can outface the 
 Sphinx. It is destructible only by death. 
 Whoever has married a prim woman must 
 hand over his breeches and his purse, he will 
 collect postage stamps in his old age, he will 
 twiddle his thumbs and smile when the vis- 
 itor asks him a question, he will grow to dis- 
 like beer, and will admit and assert that a 
 man's place is the home — these things come 
 to pass as surely as the procession of the 
 seasons. 
 
 It may be asked why he had married her, 
 and it would be difficult to find an answer to 
 that question. The same query might be put 
 to almost any couple, for (and it is pos- 
 sibly right that it should be so) we do not 
 171 
 
172 HERE ARE LADIES 
 
 marry by mathematics, but by some extraor- 
 dinary attraction which is neither entirely 
 sexual nor mental. Something other than 
 these, something as yet uncharted by psy- 
 chology, is the determining factor. It may 
 be that the universal, strange chemistry of 
 nature, planning granite and twig, ant and 
 onion, is also ordering us more imperatively 
 and more secretly than we are aware. 
 
 He had always been a hasty creature. He 
 never had any brains, and had never felt the 
 lack of them. He was one of those men who 
 are called "strong," because of their imper- 
 fect control over themselves. His appetites 
 and his mental states ruled him. He was 
 impatient of any restraint; whatever he 
 wanted to do he wanted urgently to do and 
 would touch no alternatives. He had the 
 robust good humour which will cheerfully 
 forgive you to-morrow for the wrongs he 
 has done you to-day. He bore no malice to 
 any one on earth except those who took their 
 medicine badly. Meek people got on very 
 well with him because they behaved them- 
 selves, but he did not like them to believe 
 they would inherit the earth. 
 
 Some people marry because other people 
 have done so. It is in the air, like clothing 
 
THE HORSES 173 
 
 and art and not eating with a knife. He, of 
 course, got married because he wanted to, 
 and the singular part of it was that he did 
 not mate with a meek woman. Perhaps he 
 thought she was meek, for before marriage 
 there is a habit of deference on both sides 
 which is misleading and sometimes trouble- 
 some. 
 
 From the beginning of their marriage he 
 had fought against his wife with steadiness 
 and even ferocity. Scarcely had they been 
 wed when her gently-repressive hand was 
 laid upon him, and, like a startled horse, he 
 bounded at the touch into freedom — that is, 
 as far as the limits of the matrimonial rope 
 would permit. Of course he came back 
 again — there was the rope, and the unfail- 
 ing, untiring hand easing him to the way he 
 was wanted to go. 
 
 There was no fighting against that. Or, 
 at least, it did not seem that fighting was any 
 use. Qne may punch a bag, but the bag does 
 not mind, and at last one grows weary of 
 unproductive quarrelling. One shrugs one's 
 shoulders, settles to the collar, and accepts 
 whatever destiny the gods, in their wisdom, 
 have ordained. Is life the anvil upon which 
 the gods beat out their will? It is not so. 
 
174 HERE ARE LADIES 
 
 The anvil is matter, the will of the gods is 
 life itself, urging through whatever torment 
 to some identity which it can only surmise or 
 hope for ; and the one order to life is that it 
 shall not cease to rebel until it has ceased to 
 live ; when, perhaps, it can take up the shap- 
 ing struggle in some other form or some 
 other place. 
 
 But he had almoGl. given in. Practically 
 he had bowed to the new order. Domestic 
 habits were settling about him thick as cob- 
 webs, and as clinging. His feet were wiped 
 on the mat when he came in. His hat was 
 hung on the orthodox projection. His kiss 
 was given at the stated time, and lasted for 
 the regulation period. The chimney-corner 
 claimed him and got him. The window was 
 his outlook on life. Beyond the hall door 
 were foreign lands inhabited by people who 
 were no longer of his kind. The cat and the 
 canary, these were his familiars, and his wife 
 was rapidly becoming his friend. 
 
 Once a day he trod solemnly forth on the 
 designated walk — 
 
 "Be back before one o'clock," said the 
 voice of kind authority, "lunch will be 
 ready." 
 
THE HORSES 175 
 
 "Won't you be back before two?" said 
 that voice, "the lawn has to be rolled." 
 
 "Don't stay out after three," the voice 
 entreated, "we are going to visit Aunt Kate." 
 
 And at one and two and three o'clock he 
 paced urgently wifeward. He ate the lunch 
 that was punctually ready. He rolled the 
 inevitable lawn. He trod sturdily to meet 
 the Aunt Kate and did not quail, and then 
 he went home again. One climbed to bed at 
 ten o'clock, one was gently spoken to until 
 eleven o'clock, and then one went to sleep. 
 
 On a day she entrusted him with a sum of 
 money, and requested that he should go down 
 to the town and pay at certain shops certain 
 bills, the details whereof she furnished to 
 him on paper. 
 
 "Be back before three o'clock," said the 
 good lady, "for the Fegans are coming to 
 tea. You need not take your umbrella, it 
 won't rain, and you ought to leave your pipe 
 behind, it doesn't look nice. Bring some 
 cigarettes instead, and your walking-stick if 
 you like, and be sure to be back before 
 three." 
 
 He pressed his pipe into a thing on the 
 wall which was meant for pipes, put his cig- 
 
176 HERE ARE LADIES 
 
 arette-case into his pocket, and took his 
 walking-stick in his hand. 
 
 "You did not kiss me good-bye," said she 
 gently. 
 
 So he returned and did that, and then he 
 went out. 
 
 It was a delicious day. The sun was shin- 
 ing with all its might. One could see that 
 it liked shining, and hoped everybody en- 
 joyed its art. If there were birds about any- 
 where it is certain they were singing. In 
 this suburb, however, there were only spar- 
 rows, but they hopped and flew, and flew and 
 hopped, and cocked their heads sideways and 
 chirped something cheerful, but possibly 
 rude, as one passed. They were busy to the 
 full extent of their beings, playing innocent 
 games with happy little flies, and there was 
 not one worry among a thousand of them. 
 
 There was a cat lying on a hot window- 
 ledge. She was Jooking drowsily at the spar- 
 rows, and any one could see that she loved 
 them and wished them well. 
 
 There was a dog stretched across a door- 
 way. He was very quiet, but he was not in 
 the least bored. He was taking a sun-bath, 
 and he was watching the cat. So steadily 
 did he observe her that one discerned at a 
 
THE HORSES 177 
 
 glance he was her friend, and would protect 
 her at any cost. 
 
 There was a small boy who held in his left 
 hand a tin can and a piece of string. With 
 his right hand he was making affectionate 
 gestures to the dog. He loved playing with 
 animals, and he always rewarded their trust 
 in him. 
 
 Our traveller paced slowly onwards, look- 
 ing at his feet as he went. He noticed with a 
 little dismay that he could not see as much 
 of his legs as he thought he should see. 
 There was a slight but nicely-shaped curve 
 between him and his past — 
 
 "I am getting fat," said he to himself, and 
 the reflection carried him back to the morn- 
 ing mirror — 
 
 "I am getting a bit bald, too," said he, 
 and a quiet sadness took possession of him. 
 
 But he reassured himself. One does get 
 fat. "Every one gets fat," said he, "after he 
 gets married." He reviewed his friends and 
 acquaintances, and found that this was true, 
 and he bowed before an immutable decree. 
 
 "One does get bald," quoth he. "Every- 
 body gets bald. The wisest people in the 
 world lose their hair. Kings and generals, 
 rich people and poor people, they are all 
 
178 HERE ARE LADIES 
 
 bald! It is not a disgrace," said he; and he 
 trod soberly forward in the sunshine. 
 
 A young man caught up on him from 
 behind, and strode past. He was whistling. 
 His coat-tails were lifted and his hands were 
 thrust in his pockets. His elbows jerked to 
 left and right as he marched. 
 
 "A fellow oughtn't to swagger about like 
 that," said our traveller. "What does he 
 want to tuck up his coat for, anyhow ? It's 
 not decent," said he in a low voice. "It 
 makes people laugh," said he. 
 
 A girl came out of a shop near by and 
 paced down in their direction. She looked 
 at the young man as they passed, and then 
 she turned again, a glance, no more, and 
 looked after him without stopping her pace. 
 She came on. She had no pockets to stick 
 her hands in, but she also was swaggering. 
 There was a left and right movement of her 
 shoulders, an impetus and retreat of her hips. 
 Something very strong and yet reticent about 
 her surging body. She passed the traveller 
 and went down the road. 
 
 "She did not look at me," said he, and his 
 mind folded its hand across its stomach, and 
 sat down, while he went forward in the sun- 
 light to do his errands. 
 
THE HORSES i79 
 
 He stopped to light a cigarette, and stood 
 for a few minutes watching the blue smoke 
 drifting and thinning away on the air. 
 While he stood a man drove up with a horse 
 and car. The car was laden with groceries 
 — ^packets of somebody's tea, boxes of some- 
 body's chocolate, bottles of beer and of min- 
 eral water, tins of boot blacking, and parcels 
 of soap; confectionery, and tinned fish, 
 cheese, macaroni, and jam. 
 
 The man was beating the horse as he ap- 
 proached, and the traveller looked at them 
 both through a wreath of smoke. 
 
 "I wonder," said he, "why that man beats 
 his horse?" 
 
 The driver was sitting at ease. He was 
 not angry. He was not impatient. There 
 was nothing the matter with him at all. But 
 he was steadily beating the horse; not 
 harshly, gently in truth. He beat the horse 
 without ill-will, almost without knowing he 
 was doing it. It was a sort of wrist exer- 
 cise. A quick, delicate twitch of the whip 
 that caught the animal under the belly, al- 
 ways in the same place. It was very skilful, 
 but the driver was so proficient in his art that 
 one wondered why he had to practice at it 
 any longer. And the horse did not make 
 
i8o HERE ARE LADIES 
 
 any objection ! Not even with his ears ; they 
 lay back to his mane as he jogged steadily 
 forward in the sunlight. His hooves were 
 shod with iron, but they moved with an un- 
 faltering, humble regularity. His mouth 
 was filled with great, yellow teeth, but he 
 kept his mouth shut, and one could not see 
 them. He did not increase or diminish his 
 pace under the lash; he jogged onwards, and 
 did not seem to mind it. 
 
 The reins were jerked suddenly, and the 
 horse turned into the path and stopped, and 
 when he stood he was not any quieter than 
 when he had been moving. He did not raise 
 his head or whisk his tail. He did not move 
 his ears to the sounds behind and on either 
 side of him. He did not paw and fumble 
 with his feet. There was a swarm of flies 
 about his head; they moved along from the 
 point of his nose to the top of his forehead, 
 but mostly they clustered in black, obscene 
 patches about his eyes, and through these 
 patches his eyes looked out with a strange 
 patience, a strange mildness. He was stat- 
 ing a fact over and over to himself, and he 
 could not think of anything else — 
 
 "There are no longer any meadows in the 
 world," said he. "They came in the night 
 
THE HORSES i8i 
 
 and took away the green meadows, and the 
 horses do not know what to do." . . . 
 Horse ! Horse ! Little horse ! . . . You do 
 not beheve me. There are those who have 
 no whips. There are children who would 
 love to lift you in their arms and stroke your 
 head. . . . 
 
 The driver came again, he mounted to his 
 seat, and the horse turned carefully and 
 trotted away. 
 
 The man with the cigarette looked after 
 them for a few minutes, and then he also 
 turned carefully to do his errands. 
 
 He reached the Railway Station and 
 peered in at the clock. There were some men 
 in uniform striding busily about. Three or 
 four people were moving up the steps 
 towards the ticket office. A raggedy man 
 shook a newspaper in his face, paused for 
 half a second, and fled away bawling his 
 news. A red-faced woman pushed hastily 
 past him. She was carrying a big basket 
 and a big baby. She was terribly engrossed 
 by both, and he wondered if she had to drop 
 one which of them it would be. A short, 
 stout, elderly man was hoisting himself and 
 a great leather portmanteau by easy stages 
 up the steps. He was very determined. He 
 
i82 HERE ARE LADIES 
 
 bristled at everybody as at an enemy. He 
 regarded inanimate nature as if he was dar- 
 ing it to move. It would not be easy to make 
 that man miss a train. A young lady trod 
 softly up the steps. She draped snowy gar- 
 ments about her, but her ankles rebelled: 
 whoever looked quickly saw them once, and 
 then she spoke very severely to them, and 
 they hid themselves. It was plain that she 
 could scarcely control them, and that they 
 would escape again when she wasn't look- 
 ing. A young man bounded up the steps; 
 he was too late to see them, and he looked 
 as if he knew it. He stared angrily at the 
 girl, but she lifted her chin slightly and re- 
 fused to admit that he was alive. A very 
 small boy was trying to push a large india- 
 rubber ball into his mouth, but his mouth 
 was not big enough to hold it, and he wept 
 because of his limitations. He was towed 
 along by his sister, a girl so tall that one 
 might say her legs reached to heaven, and 
 maybe they did. 
 
 He looked again at the hour. It was one 
 minute to two o'clock; and then something 
 happened. The whole white world became 
 red. The oldest seas in the world went sud- 
 denly lashing into storm. An ocean of blood 
 
THE HORSES 183 
 
 thundered into his head, and the noise of 
 that primitive flood, roaring from what pre- 
 historic gulfs, deafened him at an instant. 
 The waves whirled his feet from under him. 
 He went foaming up the steps, was swept 
 violently into the ticket office, and was 
 swirled away like a bobbing cork into the 
 train. A guard tried to stop him, for the 
 train was already taking its pace, but one 
 cannot keep out the tide with a ticket- 
 puncher. The guard was overwhelmed, 
 caught in the backwash, and swirled some- 
 where, anywhere, out of sight and knowl- 
 edge. The train gathered speed, went fly- 
 ing out of the station into the blazing sun- 
 light, picked up its heels and ran, and ran, 
 and ran; the wind leaped by the carriage 
 window, shrieking with laughter; the wide 
 fields danced with each other, shouting aloud 
 
 "The horses are coming again to the green 
 meadows. Make way, make way for the 
 gjeat, wild horses !" 
 
 And the trees went leaping from horizon 
 to horizon shrieking and shrieking the news. 
 
MISTRESS QUIET-EYES 
 
 While I sit beside the window 
 I can hear the pigeons coo, 
 That the air is warm and blue. 
 And how well the young bird flew — 
 Then I fold my arms and scold the heart 
 That thought the pigeons knew. 
 
 While I sit beside the window 
 
 I can watch the flowers grow 
 
 Till the seeds are ripe and blow 
 
 To the fruitful earth below — 
 
 Then I shut my eyes and tell my heart 
 
 The flowers cannot know. 
 
 While I sit beside the window 
 
 I am growing old and drear; 
 
 Does it matter what I hear. 
 
 What I see, or what I fear? 
 
 I can fold my hands and hush my heart 
 
 That is straining to a tear. 
 
 The earth is gay with leaf and flower. 
 
 The fruit is ripe upon the tree. 
 
 The pigeons coo in the swinging bower. 
 
 But I sit wearily 
 
 Watching a beggar-woman nurse 
 
 A baby on her knee. 
 
THREE LOVERS WHO LOST 
 
THREE LOVERS WHO LOST 
 
 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 af- 
 ternoon, and whether the packet of cigarettes 
 w;hich 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 
 189 
 
190 HERE ARE LADIES 
 
 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 nico- 
 tine inexorably accumulating. — He bought a 
 book on etiquette and a pot of paste for mak- 
 ing 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 dis- 
 covered that a well-bred person always 
 speaks to the young lady's parents before 
 he speaks to the young lady. He straight- 
 ened his shoulders. — It would be almost as 
 
THREE LOVERS WHO LOST 191 
 
 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 cop- 
 ies 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, more- 
 over, 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 
 
192 HERE ARE LADIES 
 
 to him when he wanted to be let aloske. 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 sup- 
 per 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 
 
THREE LOVERS WHO LOST 193 
 
 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 so- 
 prano) 'I am going to a dance, mother, at 
 the Durkins' ' " 
 
 "Ha'penny hops !" said her husband fierce- 
 ly. "Can't you cut me a bit of bread !'' 
 
194 HERE ARE LADIES 
 
 "And another night, 'she wants to go out 
 to see Mary Durkan.' " 
 
 "I know her well, a big hat and no mor- 
 als, 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 gamyact- 
 ing and ha-ha'ing out of them." 
 
 "I can't keep her in," said his wife, wring- 
 ing 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 condemna- 
 tory 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? 
 
THREE LOVERS WHO LOST 195 
 
 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 speak- 
 ing— 
 
 " 'Where are you going to, Julia Eliza- 
 beth?' said L 'Out,' said she, and not an- 
 other 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. 
 
196 HERE ARE LADIES 
 
 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 Dub- 
 lin Bay herrings, or boot-laces either, so you 
 can go away. — The crankiness of that man 
 is more than tongue can tell. As Miss Garty 
 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 fall- 
 ing 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 mo- 
 ment from her food to her visitor, but as 
 good manners and a lady are never separate 
 
THREE LOVERS WHO LOST 197 
 
 she welcomed and drew the young man in- 
 side — 
 
 "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 win- 
 dow, 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 sup- 
 posed 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 atmo- 
 sphere. — He replied — 
 
 "I don't think there is any news to tell, 
 
198 HERE ARE LADIES 
 
 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 h!er 
 my love all the same, but maybe she doesn't 
 want it either." 
 
 "You see," said the young man, "the chil- 
 dren 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 inter- 
 ested lady. "It's real bad for a stout per- 
 son to be angry. Apoplexy or something 
 might ensue and death would be instanta- 
 neous 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 raspber- 
 ries eightpence the pound in Grafton Street, 
 and the best preserving sugar twopence- 
 
THREE LOVERS WHO LOST 199 
 
 three- farthings, and coal the way it is. — Ah, 
 no matter, God is good, and we can't Hve for 
 ever." 
 
 The four seconds of silence which fol- 
 lowed was broken by the lover — 
 
 "Is Julia E^lizabeth in, ma'm?" said he 
 timidly. 
 
 "She's not, then," was the reply. "We all 
 have our trials, Mr. O'Grady, and she's 
 mine. I don't complain, but I don't deserve 
 it, for a harder working woman never lived, 
 but there you are." 
 
 "I'm rather glad she's out," said the youth 
 hastily, "for I wanted to speak to yourself 
 and your husband before I said anything to 
 her." 
 
 Mrs. O'Reilly wheeled slowly to face 
 him — 
 
 "Did you now ?" said she, "and is it about 
 Julia Elizabeth you came over? Well, well, 
 well, just to think of it! But I guessed it 
 long ago, when you bought the yellow boots. 
 She's a real good girl, Mr. O'Grady. There's 
 many and many's the young man, and they 
 in good positions, mind you — but maybe you 
 don't mean that at all. Is it a message from 
 your Aunt Jane or your mother ? Your Aur^t 
 Jane does send messages, God help her !" 
 
200 HERE ARE LADIES 
 
 "It's not, Mrs. O'Reilly: it's, if I may pre- 
 sume to say so, about myself." 
 
 "I knew it," was the rapid and enthusias- 
 tic reply. "She's a fine cook, Mr. O'Grady, 
 and a head of hair that reaches down to her 
 waist, and won prizes at school for compo- 
 sition. I'll call himself — ^he'll be delighted. 
 He's in the next room making faces at a 
 map. Maps are a terrible occupation, Mr. 
 O'Grady, they spoil his eyesight and make 
 him curse " 
 
 She ambled to the door and called ur- 
 gently — 
 
 "O'Reilly, here's young Mr. O'Grady 
 wants to see you." 
 
 Her husband entered with a pen in his 
 mouth and looked very severely at his visi- 
 tor— 
 
 "What brought you round, young man?" 
 said he. 
 
 The youth became very nervous. He stood 
 up stammering — 
 
 "It's a delicate subject, sir," said he, "and 
 I thought it would only be right to come to 
 you first." 
 
 Here the lady broke in rapturously — 
 
 "Isn't it splendid, O'Reilly! You and me 
 sitting here growing old and contented, and 
 
THREE lyOVERS WHO LOST 201 
 
 this young gentleman talking to us the way 
 he is. Doesn't it make you think of the song 
 'John Anderson, my Jo, John' ?" 
 
 Her husband turned a bewildered but sav- 
 age eye on his spouse — 
 
 "It does not, ma'm," said he. "Well," he 
 barked at Mr. O'Grady, "what do you 
 want?" 
 
 "I want to speak about your daughter, 
 sir." 
 
 "She's not a delicate subject." 
 
 "No indeed," said his wife. "Never a 
 day's illness in her life except the measles, 
 and they're wholesome when you're young, 
 and an appetite worth cooking for, two eggs 
 every morning and more if she got it." 
 
 Her husband turned on her with hands of 
 frenzy — 
 
 "Oh !" said he, and then to their 
 
 visitor, "What have you to say about my 
 daughter ?" 
 
 "The fact is, sir," he stammered, "I'm in 
 love with her." 
 
 "I see, you are the delicate subject, and 
 what then?" 
 
 "And I want to marry her, sir." 
 
 "That's not delicacy, that's disease, young 
 
202 HERE ARE LADIES 
 
 man. Have you spoken to Julia Elizabeth 
 about this?" 
 
 "No, sir, I wanted first to obtain your and 
 Mrs. O'Reilly's permission to approach her." 
 
 "And quite right, too," said the lady 
 warmly. "Isn't it delightful," she continued, 
 "to see a young, bashful youth telling of his 
 love for our dear child? Doesn't it make 
 you think of Moore's beautiful song, 'Love's 
 Young Dream,' O'Reilly?" 
 
 "It does not," her husband snapped, "I 
 never heard of the song I tell you, and I 
 never want to." 
 
 He turned again to the youth — 
 
 "If you are in earnest about this, you have 
 my permission to court Julia Elizabeth as 
 much as she'll let you. But don't blame me 
 if she marries you. People who take risks 
 must expect accidents. Don't go about 
 lamenting that I hooked you in, or led you 
 on, or anything like that. — I tell you, here 
 and now, that she has a rotten teniper — " 
 
 His wife was aghast — 
 
 "For shame, O'Reilly," said she. 
 
 Her husband continued, looking steadily 
 at her — 
 
 "A rotten temper," said he, "she gives 
 back answers." 
 
THREE LOVERS WHO LOST 203 
 
 "Never," was Mrs. O'Reilly's wild ex- 
 clamation. 
 
 "She scratches like a cat," said her 
 husband. 
 
 "It's a falsehood," cried the lady, almost 
 in tears. 
 
 "She is obstinate, sulky, stubborn and can- 
 tankerous." 
 
 "A tissue," said his wife. "An absolute 
 tissue," she repeated with the firmness which 
 masks hysteria. 
 
 Her husband continued inexorably — 
 
 "She's a gad-about, a pavement-hopper, 
 and when she has the toothache she curses 
 like a carman. Now, young man, marry her 
 if you like." 
 
 These extraordinary accusations were 
 powerless against love and etiquette — the 
 young man stood up : his voice rang — 
 
 "I will, sir," said he steadily, "and I'll be 
 proud to be her husband." 
 
 In a very frenzy of enthusiasm, Mrs. 
 O'Reilly arose — 
 
 "Good boy," said she. "Tell your Aunt 
 Jane I'll send her another pot of jam." She 
 turned to her husband, "Isn't it delightful, 
 O'Reilly, doesn't it make you think of the 
 song, 'True, True Till Death'?" 
 
204 HERE ARE LADIES 
 
 Mr. O'Reilly replied grimly — 
 
 "It does not, ma'm. — I'm going back to 
 my work." 
 
 "Be a gentleman, O'Reilly," said his wife 
 pleadingly. "Won't you offer Mr. O'Grady 
 a bottle of stout or a drop of spirits ?" 
 
 The youth intervened hastily, for it is well 
 to hide one's vices from one's family — 
 
 "Oh no, ma'm, not at all," said he, "I 
 never drink intoxicating liquors." 
 
 "Splendid," said the beaming lady. 
 "You're better without it. If you knew the 
 happy homes it has ruined, and the things 
 the clergy say about it you'd be astonished. 
 I only take it myself for the rheumatism, but 
 I never did like it, did I, O'Reilly?" 
 
 "Never, ma'm," was his reply. "I only 
 take it myself because my hearing is bad. 
 Now, listen to me, young man. You want 
 to marry Julia Elizabeth, and I'll be glad to 
 see her married to a sensible, sober, indus- 
 trious husband. — ^When I spoke about her a 
 minute ago I was only joking." 
 
 "I knew it all the time," said his wife. 
 "Do you remember, Mr. O'Grady, I winked 
 at you?" 
 
 "The girl is a good girl," said her hus- 
 band, "and well brought up." 
 
THREE LOVERS WHO LOST 205 
 
 "Yes," said his wife, "her hair reaches 
 down to her waist, and she won a prize for 
 composition — Jessica's First Prayer, all 
 about a girl with " 
 
 Mr. O'Reilly continued — 
 
 "She brings me up a cup of tea every 
 morning before I get up." 
 
 "She never wore spectacles in her life," 
 said Mrs. O'Reilly, "and she got a prize for 
 freehand drawing." 
 
 "She did so," said Mr. O'Reilly. 
 
 His wife continued — 
 
 "The Schoolboy Baronet it was ; all about 
 a young man that broke his leg down a coal 
 mine and it never got well again until he 
 met the girl of his heart." 
 
 "Tell me," said Mr. O'Reilly, "how are 
 you young people going to live, and where ?" 
 
 His wife interpolated — 
 
 "Your Aunt Jane told me that you had 
 seventeen shillings and sixpence a week. — 
 Take my advice and live on the south side — 
 two rooms easily and most salubrious." 
 
 The young man coughed guardedly, he 
 had received a rise of wages since that in- 
 formation passed, but candour belongs to 
 childhood, and one must live these frailties 
 down — 
 
2o6 HERE ARE LADIES 
 
 "Seventeen and six isn't very much, of 
 course," said he, "but I am young and 
 strong " 
 
 "It's more than I had," said his host, 
 "when I was your age. Hello, there's the 
 post!" 
 
 Mrs. O'Reilly went to the door and re- 
 turned instantly with a letter in her hand. 
 She presented it to her husband— 
 
 "It's addressed to you, O'Reilly," said 
 she plaintively. "Maybe it's a bill, but God's 
 good and maybe it's a cheque." 
 
 Her husband nodded at the company and 
 tore his letter open. He read it, and, at once 
 as it appeared, he went mad, he raved, he 
 stuttered, now slapping the letter with his 
 forefinger and, anon, shaking his fist at his 
 wife — 
 
 "Here's your daughter, ma'm," he stam- 
 mered. "Here's your daughter, I say." 
 
 "Where?" cried the amazed lady. "What 
 is it, O'Reilly?" She arose hastily and rolled 
 towards him. 
 
 Mr. O'Reilly repelled her fiercely — 
 
 "A good riddance," he shouted. 
 
 "Tell me, O'Reilly, I command you," cried 
 his wife. 
 
 "A minx, a jade," snarled the man. 
 
THREE LOVERS WHO LOST 207 
 
 "I insist," said she. "I must be told. I'm 
 not well, I tell you. My head's going round. 
 Give me the letter." 
 
 Mr. O'Reilly drew about him a sudden 
 and terrible calmness — 
 
 "Listen, woman," said he, "and you too., 
 young man, and be thankful for your escape. 
 
 "Dear Pa," he read, "this is to tell you that I got 
 married to-day to Christie Rorke. We are going to 
 open a little fried-fish shop near Amiens Street. 
 Hoping this finds yon as it leaves me at present, 
 your loving daughter, 
 
 "Julia Elizabeth. 
 
 "P.5*.— Give Christie's love to M?." 
 
 Mrs. O'Reilly sank again to her chair. 
 Her mouth was partly open. She breathed 
 with difficulty. Her eyes were fixed on 
 space, and she seemed to be communing with 
 the guardians of Chaos — 
 
 "Married !" said she in a musing whisper. 
 "Christie !" said she. She turned to her hus- 
 band — "What an amazing thing. Doesn't 
 it make you think, O'Reilly, of the poem, 
 'The World Recedes, it Disappears'?" 
 
 "It does not, ma'm," said her husband 
 savagely. 
 
2o8 HERE ARE LADIES 
 
 "And what is this young gentleman going 
 to do?" she continued, gazing tearfully at 
 the suitor. 
 
 "He's going to go home," replied her hus- 
 band fiercely. "He ought to be in bed long 
 ago." 
 
 "A broken heart," said his wife, "is a sad 
 •companion to go home with. Doesn't it 
 make you think of the song ?" 
 
 "It does not, ma'm," roared her husband. 
 "I'm going back to my work," and once 
 again the door banged and the room shook. 
 
 Young Mr. O'Grady arose timidly. The 
 world was swimming about him. L/Ove had 
 deserted him, and etiquette was now his 
 sole anchor; he shook hands with Mrs. 
 O'Reilly— 
 
 "I think I had better be going now," said 
 he. "Good-bye, Mrs. O'Reilly." 
 
 "Must you really go ?" said that lady with 
 the smile of a maniac. 
 
 "I'm afraid so," and he moved towards 
 the door. 
 
 "Well," said she, "give my love to your 
 mother and your Aunt Jane." 
 
 "I will," was his reply, "and," with firm 
 politeness, "thank you for a very pleasant 
 evening." 
 
THREE LOVERS WHO LOST 209 
 
 "Don't mention it, Mr. O'Grady. Good- 
 bye." 
 
 Mrs. O'Reilly closed the door and walked 
 back towards the table smiling madly. She 
 sank into a chair. Her eye fell on the 
 butter-knife — 
 
 "I haven't had a bit to eat this day," said 
 she in a loud and threatening voice, and once 
 again she pulled the loaf towards her. 
 
II 
 
 His mother finished reading the story of the 
 Beautiful Princess, and it was surely the 
 saddest story he had ever heard. He could 
 not bear to think of that lovely and delicate 
 lady all alone in the great, black forest wait- 
 ing until the giant came back from killing 
 her seven brothers. He would return with 
 their seven heads swinging pitifully from 
 his girdle, and, when he reached the castle 
 gates, he would gnash his teeth through the 
 keyhole with a noise like the grinding to- 
 gether of great rocks, and would poke his 
 head through the fanlight of the door, and 
 say, fee-faw-fum in a voice of such exceed- 
 ing loudness that the castle would be shaken 
 to its foundation. 
 
 Thinking of this made his throat grow 
 painful with emotion, and then his heart 
 swelled to the most uncomfortable dimen- 
 sions, and he resolved to devote his whole 
 life to the rescue of the Princess, and, if 
 necessary, die in her defence. 
 
 2IO 
 
THREE LOVERS WHO LOST 211 
 
 Such was his impatience that he could not 
 wait for anything more than his dinner, and 
 this he ate so speedily that his father called 
 him a Per feet- Young-Glutton, and a Dis- 
 grace-To-Any-Table. He bore these insults 
 in a meek and heroic spirit, whereupon his 
 mother said that he must be ill, and it was 
 only by a violent and sustained outcry that 
 he escaped being sent to bed. 
 
 Immediately after dinner he set out in 
 search of the giant's castle. Now there is 
 scarcely anything in the world more difficult 
 to find than a giant's castle, for it is so large 
 that one can only see it through the wrong 
 end of a telescope ; and, furthermore, he did 
 not even know this giant's name. He might 
 never have found the place if he had not met 
 a certain old woman on the common. 
 
 She was a very nice old woman. She had 
 three teeth, a red shawl, and an umbrella 
 with groceries inside it; so he told her of the 
 difficulty he was in. 
 
 She replied that he was in luck's way, and 
 that she was the only person in the world 
 who could assist him. She said her name 
 was Really-and-Truly, and that she had a 
 magic head, and that if he cut her head off 
 it would answer any questions he asked it. 
 
212 HERE ARE LADIES 
 
 So he stropped his penknife on his boot,, and 
 said he was ready if she was. 
 
 The old woman then informed him that in 
 all affairs of this delicate nature it was cus- 
 tomary to take the will for the deed, and that 
 he might now ask her head anything he 
 wanted to know — so he asked the head what 
 was the way to the nearest giant, and the 
 head replied that if he took the first turning 
 to the left, the second to the right, and then 
 the first to the left again, and if he then 
 knocked at the fifth door on the right-hand 
 side, he would see the giant. 
 
 He thanked the old woman very much for 
 the use of her head, and she permitted him 
 to lend her one threepenny-piece, one pocket- 
 handkerchief, one gun-metal watch, one cap, 
 and one boot-lace. She said that she never 
 took two of anything, because that was not 
 fair, and that she wanted these for a very 
 particular, secret purpose, about which she 
 dare not speak, and, as to which she trusted 
 he would not press her, and then she took 
 a most affectionate leave of him and went 
 away. 
 
 He followed her directions with the ut- 
 most fidelity, and soon found himself oppo- 
 site a house which, to the eyes of any one 
 
THREE LOVERS WHO LOST 213 
 
 over seven years of age, looked very like 
 any other house, but which, to the searching 
 eye of six and three quarters, was patently 
 and palpably a giant's castle. 
 
 He tried the door, but it was locked, as, 
 indeed, he had expected it would be. Then 
 he crept very cautiously, and peeped through 
 the first floor window. He could see in quite 
 plainly. There was a polar bear crouching 
 on the floor, and the head looked at him so 
 directly and vindictively that if he had not 
 been a hero he would have fled. The unex- 
 pected is always terrible, and when one goes 
 forth to kill a giant it is unkind of Provi- 
 dence to complicate one's adventure with a 
 gratuitous and wholly unnecessary polar 
 bear. He was, however, reassured by the 
 sight of a heavy chair standing on the polar 
 bear's stomach, and in the chair there sat 
 the most beautiful woman in the world. 
 
 An ordinary person would not have un- 
 derstood so instantly that she was the most 
 beautiful woman in the world, because she 
 looked very stout, and much older than is 
 customary with princesses — but that was 
 owing to the fact that she was under an en- 
 chantment, and she would become quite 
 young again when the g^ant was slain and 
 
214 HERE ARE LADIES 
 
 three drops of his blood had been sprinkled 
 on her brow. 
 
 She was leaning forward in the chair, 
 staring into the fire, and she was so motion- 
 less that it was quite plain she must be under 
 an enchantment. Erom the very first instant 
 he saw the princess he loved her, and his 
 heart swelled with pity to think that so beau- 
 tiful a damsel should be subjected to the 
 tyranny of a giant. These twin passions of 
 pity and love grew to so furious a strength 
 within him that he could no longer contain 
 himself. He wept in a loud and very sud- 
 den voice which lifted the damsel out of her 
 enchantment and her chair, and hurled her 
 across the room as though she had been 
 propelled by a powerful spring. 
 
 He was so overjoyed at seeing her move 
 that he pressed his face against the glass 
 and Wept with great strength, and, in a few 
 moments, the princess came timidly to the 
 window and looked out. She looked right 
 over his head at first, and then she looked 
 dovfn and saw him, and her eyebrows went 
 far up on her forehead, and her mouth 
 opened; and so he knew that she was de- 
 lighted to see him. He nodded to give her 
 courage, and shouted three titties, "Open 
 
THREE LOVERS WHO LOST 215 
 
 Sesame, Open Sesame, Open Sesame," and 
 then she opened the window and he climbed 
 in. 
 
 The princess tried to push him out again, 
 but she was not able, and he bade her put all 
 her jewels in the heel of her boot and fly with 
 him. But she was evidently the victim 
 of a very powerful enchantment, for she 
 struggled violently, and said incomprehen- 
 sible things to him, such as "Is it a fire, or 
 were you chased?" and "Where is the cook?" 
 But after a little time she listened to the 
 voice of reason, and recognised that these 
 were legitimate and heroic embraces from 
 which she could not honourably disentangle 
 herself. 
 
 When her first transports of joy were 
 somewhat abated she assured him that ex- 
 cessive haste had often undone great 
 schemes, and that one should always look be- 
 fore one leaped, and that one should never 
 be rescued all at once, but gradually, in order 
 that one might become accustomed to the 
 severe air of freedom — and he was over- 
 joyed to find that she was as wise as she was 
 beautiful. 
 
 He told her that he loved her dearly, and 
 she admitted, after some persuasion, that 
 
2i6 HERE ARE LADIES 
 
 she was not insensible to the charms of his 
 heart and intellect, but she confessed that 
 her love was given to another. 
 
 At these tidings his heart withered away 
 within him, and when the princess admitted 
 she loved the giant his amazement became 
 profound and complicated. There was a 
 rushing sound in his ears. The debris of 
 his well-known world was crashing about 
 him, and he was staring upon a new planet, 
 the name of which was Incredulity. He 
 looked round with a queer feeling of inse- 
 curity. At any moment the floor might 
 stand up on one of its corners, or the walls 
 might begin to flap and waggle. But none 
 of these things happened. Before him sat 
 the princess in an attitude of deep dejection, 
 and her lily-white hands rested helplessly on 
 her lap. She told him in a voice that 
 trembled that she would have married him 
 if he had asked her ten years earlier, and 
 urged that she could not fly with him now, 
 because, in the first place, she had six chil- 
 dren, and, in the second place, it would be 
 against the law, and, in the third place, his 
 mother might object. She admitted that she 
 was unworthy of his love, and that she 
 should have waited, and she bore his re- 
 
THREE LOVERS WHO LOST 217 
 
 preaches with a meekness which finally dis- 
 armed him. 
 
 He stropped his penknife on his boot, and 
 said that there was nothing left but to kill 
 the giant, and that she had better leave the 
 room while he did so, because it would not 
 be a sight for a weak woman, and he won- 
 dered audibly how much hasty-pudding 
 would fall out of the giant if he stabbed 
 him right to the heart. The princess begged 
 him not to kill her husband, and assured him 
 that this giant had not got any hasty-pud- 
 ding in his heart at all, and that he was 
 really the nicest giant that ever lived, and, 
 further, that he had not killed her seven 
 brothers, but the seven brothers of quite 
 another person entirely, which was only a 
 reasonable thing to do when one looked at 
 it properly, and she continued in a strain 
 which proved to him that this unnatural 
 woman really loved the giant. 
 
 It was more in pity than in anger that he 
 recognised the impossibility of rescuing this 
 person. He saw at last that she was un- 
 worthy of being rescued, and told her so. 
 He said bitterly that he had grave doubts of 
 her being a princess at all, and that if she 
 
2i8 HERE ARE LADIES 
 
 was married to a giant it was no more than 
 she deserved, and further he had a good 
 mind to rescue the giant from hpr, and he 
 would do so in a minute, only that it was 
 against his principles to rescue giants. — 
 And, saying so, he placed his penknife be- 
 tween his teeth and climbed out through the 
 window again. 
 
 He stood for a moment outside the win- 
 dow with his right hand extended to the sky 
 and the moonlight blaziKig on his penknife — 
 a truly formidable figure, and one which the 
 princess never forgot; and then he walked 
 slowly away, hiding behind a cold and im- 
 passive demeanour a mind that was tortured 
 and a heart that had plumbed most of the 
 depths of human suffering. 
 
Ill 
 
 AivOYSius Murphy went a-courting when 
 the Woods were green. There were grapes 
 in the air and birds in the river. A voice 
 and a song went everywhere, and the voice 
 said, "Where is my beloved?" and the song 
 repHed, "Thy beloved is awaiting thee, and 
 she stretches her hands abroad and laughs 
 for thy coming; bind then the feather of a 
 bird to thy heel and a red rose upon thy 
 hair, and go quickly." 
 
 So he took his hat from behind the door 
 and his stick from beside the bed and went 
 out into the evening. 
 
 He had been engaged to Miss Nora Mac- 
 Mahon for two ecstatic months, and held 
 the opinion that the earth and the heavens 
 were aware of the intensity of his passion, 
 and applauded the unique justice of his 
 choice. 
 
 By day he sat humbly in a solicitor's office, 
 or scurried through the thousand offices of 
 
 219 
 
220 HERE ARE LADIES 
 
 the Four Courts, but with night came free- 
 dom, and he felt himself to be of the kin- 
 dred of the gods and marched in pomp. By 
 what subterranean workings had he become 
 familiar with the lady? Suffice it that the 
 impossible is possible to a lover. Everything 
 can be achieved in time. The man who 
 wishes to put a mountain in his pocket can 
 do so if his pocket and his wish be of the 
 requisite magnitude. 
 
 Now the lady towards whom the raging 
 torrent of his affections had been directed 
 was the daughter of his employer, and this, 
 while it notated romance, pointed also to 
 tragedy. Further, while this fact was well 
 within his knowledge, it was far from the 
 cognizance of the lady. He would have en- 
 lightened her on the point, but the longer 
 he delayed the revelation, the more difficult 
 did it become. Perpetually his tongue ached 
 to utter the truth. When he might be 
 squeezing her hand or plunging his glance 
 into the depths of her eyes, consciousness 
 would touch him on the shoulder with a bony 
 hand and say, "That is the boss's daughter 
 you are hugging" — a reminder which was 
 provocative sometimes of an almost unholy 
 delight, when to sing and dance and go mad 
 
THREE LOVERS WHO LOST 221 
 
 was but natural; but at other times it 
 brought with it moods of woe, abysses of 
 blackness. 
 
 In the solitude of the room wherein he 
 lodged he sometimes indulged in a small 
 drama, wherein, as the hero, he would smile 
 a slightly sad and quizzical smile, and say 
 gently, "Child, you are Mr. MacMahon's 
 daughter, I am but his clerk" — here the smile 
 became more sadly quizzical — "how can I 
 ask you to forsake the luxury of a residence 
 in Clontarf for the uncongenial, nay, bleak 
 surroundings of a South Circular Road 
 habitation?" And she, ah me! She vowed 
 that a hut and a crust and the love of her 
 heart. . . ! No matter! 
 
 So, nightly, Aloysius Murphy took the 
 tram to Clontarf, and there, wide-coated and 
 sombreroed like a mediseval conspirator, he 
 trod delicately beside his cloaked and hooded 
 inamorata, whispering of the spice of the 
 wind and the great stretches of the sea. 
 
 Now a lover who comes with the shades 
 of night, harbinger of the moon, and hand 
 in glove with the stars, must be a very ro- 
 mantic person indeed, and, even if he is not, 
 a lady whose years are tender can easily sup- 
 ply the necessary gauze to tone down his too- 
 
222 HERE ARE LADIES 
 
 rigorous projections. But the bird that flies 
 by night must adduce for our curiosity sub- 
 stantial reason why his flight has deserted 
 the whiteness of the daytime; else we may 
 be tempted to believe that his advent in 
 darkness is thus shrouded for even duskier 
 purposes. — Miss MacMahon had begun to 
 inquire who Mr. Murphy was, and he had, 
 accordingly, begun to explain who he was 
 not. This explanation had wrapped his 
 identity in the most labyrinthine mystery, 
 but Miss MacMahon detected in the rapid, 
 incomprehensible fluctuations of his story a 
 heart torn by unmerited misfortune, and 
 whose agony could only be alleviated by lay- 
 ing her own dear head against its turmoil. 
 
 To a young girl a confidant is almost as 
 necessary as a lover, and when the rendez- 
 vous is clandestine, the youth mysterious, 
 and his hat broad-leafed and flapping, then 
 the necessity for a confidant becomes im- 
 perative. 
 
 Miss MacMahon confided the knowledge 
 of all her happiness to the thrilled ear of her 
 younger sister, who at once hugged her, and 
 bubbled query, conjecture, and admonish- 
 ment. ". . . Long or short? . . . Dark or 
 fair?" ". . . and slender . . . with eyes 
 
THREE I.OVERS WHO LOST 223 
 
 . . . dove . . . lightning . . . hair . . . and so 
 gentle . . . and then I said . . . and then 
 he said . . .!" "Oh, sweet!" sighed the 
 younger sister, and she stretched her arms 
 wide and crushed the absent excellences of 
 Mr. Murphy to her youthful breast. 
 
 On returning next day from church, hav- 
 ing listened awe-stricken to a sermon on 
 filial obedience, the little sister bound her 
 mother to secrecy, told the story, and said 
 she wished she were dead. Subsequently 
 the father of Clann MacMahon was in- 
 formed, and he said "Hum" and "Ha," and 
 rolled a fierce, hard eye, and many times 
 during the progress of the narrative he in- 
 terjected with furious energy these words, 
 "Don't be a fool, Jane," and Mrs. Mac- 
 Mahon responded meekly, "Yes, dear," and 
 Mr. MacMahon then said "Hum" and 
 "Ha" and "Gr-r-r-up" in a truly terrible and 
 ogreish manner ; and in her distant cliamber 
 Miss MacMahon heard the reverberation of 
 that sonorous grunt, and whispered to her 
 little sister, "Pa's in a wax," and the little 
 sister pretended to be asleep. 
 
 The spectacle of an elderly gentleman, 
 side-whiskered, precise and grey, disguising 
 himself with mufflers and a squash hat, and 
 
224 HERE ARE LADIES 
 
 stalking with sombre fortitude the erratic 
 wanderings of a pair of young feather- 
 heads, is one which mirth may be pleased to 
 linger upon. Such a spectacle was now to 
 be observed in the semi-rural outskirts of 
 Clontarf. Mr. MacMahon tracked his 
 daughter with considerable stealth, adopt- 
 ing unconsciously the elongated and nervous 
 stride of a theatrical villain. He saw her 
 meet a young man wearing a broad-brimmed 
 hat, whose clothing was mysteriously the- 
 atrical, and whose general shape, when it 
 could be glimpsed, was oddly familiar. 
 
 "I have seen that fellow somewhere," said 
 he. 
 
 The lovers met and kissed, and the glaring 
 father spoke rapidly but softly to himself for 
 a few moments. He was not accustomed to 
 walking, and it appeared as if these two in- 
 tended to walk for ever, but he kept them in 
 sight, and when the time came for parting 
 he was close at hand. 
 
 The parting was prolonged, and renewed, 
 and rehearsed again with amendments and 
 additions: he could not have believed that 
 saying good-bye to a person could be turned 
 into so complicated and symbolic a cere- 
 mony : but, at last, his daughter, with many 
 
THREE LOVERS WHO LOST 225 
 
 a backward look and wave of hand, de- 
 parted in one direction, and the gentleman, 
 after similar signals, moved towards the 
 tramway. 
 
 "I know that fellow, whoever he is," said 
 Mr. MacMahon. 
 
 Passing a lamp-post, Mr. Aloysius Mur- 
 phy stayed for a moment to light his pipe, 
 and Mr. MacMahon stared, he ground his 
 teeth, he foamed at the mouth, and his al- 
 ready prominent eyes bulged still further 
 and rounder — 
 
 "Well, I'm !" said he. 
 
 He turned and walked homewards slowly, 
 murmuring often to himself and to the night, 
 "All right! wait, though! Hum! Ha! 
 Gr-r-r-up!" 
 
 That night he repeatedly entreated his 
 wife "not to be a fool, Jane," and she as 
 repeatedly replied, "Yes, dear." Long after 
 midnight he awoke her by roaring violently 
 from the very interior depths of a dream, 
 "Cheek of the fellow! Pup! Gr-r-r-up!" 
 
 At breakfast on the following morning he 
 suggested to his wife and elder daughter 
 that they should visit his office later on in 
 the day — 
 
 "You have never seen it, Nora," said he, 
 
'226 HERE ARE LADIES 
 
 "and you ought to have a look at the den 
 where your poor old daddy spends his time 
 grinding dress material for his family from 
 the faces of the poor. I've got some funny 
 clerks, too: one of them is a curiosity." 
 Here, growing suddenly furious, he gave an 
 egg a clout. 
 
 His daughter giggled — 
 
 ''Ohi Pst/' said she, "yott are not breaking 
 that egg, you aire murdering it." 
 
 He looked at hfef gloomily — 
 
 "It wasn't the egg I was hitting," said 
 he. "Gr-r-r-up," said he suddenly, and he 
 stabbed a piece of butter^ squashed it to 
 death on a slice of bread, and tore it to 
 pieces with his teeth. 
 
 The young lady looked at him with some 
 amazement, but she said nothing, for ghe 
 believed, as most ladies do, that men are a 
 little mad sometimes, and are foolish al- 
 ways. 
 
 Her father intercepted that glance, and 
 instantly snarled — 
 
 "Can you cook, young woman?" said he. 
 
 "Of course, father," replied the perplexed 
 maiden. 
 
 He laid aside his spoon and gave her his 
 full attention. 
 
THREE LOVERS WHO LOST227 
 
 "Can you cook potatoes ?" said he. "Can 
 you mash 'em, eh? Can you mash 'em? 
 What ! You can. They call them Murphies 
 in this country, girl. Can you mash Mur- 
 phys, eh? I can. There's a Murphy I 
 know, and, although it's been mashed al- 
 ready, by the Lord Harry, I'll mash it again. 
 Did you ever know that potatoes had eyes, 
 miss? Did you ever notice it when you 
 were cooking them? Did you ever look into 
 the eyes of a Murphy, eh? When you 
 mashed it, what? Don't answer me, girl." 
 
 "I don't know what you are talking about. 
 Pa," said the young lady. 
 
 "Don't you, now?" grinned the furious 
 gentleman, and his bulging eyes looked like 
 little round balls of glass. "Who said you 
 did, miss ? Gr-r-r-up," said he, and the poor 
 girl jumped as though she had been prodded 
 with a pin. 
 
 Mr. Aloysius Murphy's activities began 
 at ten o'clock in the morning by opening the 
 office letters with an ivory instrument and 
 handing them to his employer ; the;n, as each 
 letter was read, he entered its receipt and 
 date in a book kept for that purpose. 
 
 When Mr. MacMahon came in on the 
 
228 HERE ARE LADIES 
 
 morning following the occurrences I have 
 detailed he neglected, for the first time in 
 many years, to respond to his clerk's re- 
 spectfully-cordial salutation. To the dis- 
 creet "Good-morning, sir," he vouchsafed 
 no reply. Mr. Murphy was a trifle indig- 
 nant and a good deal perturbed, for to an 
 unquiet conscience a word or the lack of it 
 is a goad. Once or twice, looking up from 
 his book, he discovered his employer's hard 
 eyes fixed upon him with a regard too par- 
 ticular to be pleasant. 
 
 An employer seldom does more than 
 glance at his clerk, just the sideward glint of 
 a look which remarks his presence without 
 admitting his necessity, and in return the 
 clerk slants a hurried eye on his employer, 
 notes swiftly if his aspect be sulky or benign, 
 and stays his vision at that. But, now, Mr. 
 Murphy, with sudden trepidation, with a 
 frightful sinking in the pit of his stomach, 
 became aware that his employer was looking 
 at him stealthily ; and, little by little, he took 
 to sneaking glances at his employer. After 
 a few moments neither seemed to be able to 
 keep his eyes from straying — they created 
 opportunities in connection with the letters ; 
 the one looking intent, wide-eyed, and with 
 
THREE LOVERS WHO LOST 229 
 
 a cold, frigid, rigid, hard stare, and the other 
 scurrying and furtive, in-and-away, hit-and- 
 miss-and-try-again, wink, blink, and twitter. 
 
 Mr. MacMahon spoke — 
 
 "Murphy!" 
 
 "Yes, sir." 
 
 "Have you anything in Court to-day?" 
 
 "Yes, sir, an ex parte application, Donald 
 and Cluggs." 
 
 "Let O'Neill attend to it. I shall want 
 you to draft a deed for some ladies who will 
 call here at noon. You can come down at 
 ten minutes after twelve." 
 
 "Yes, sir," said Murphy. 
 
 He grabbed his share of the letters and 
 got to the door bathed in perspiration and 
 forebodings. He closed the door softly be- 
 hind him, and stood for a few seconds star- 
 ing at the handle. "Blow you!" said he 
 viciously to nothing in particular, and he 
 went slowly upstairs. 
 
 "He can't know," said he on the first 
 landing. On the second floor he thought, 
 "She couldn't have told for she didn't know 
 herself." He reached his desk. "I wish I 
 had a half of whisky," said the young man 
 to himself. 
 
 Before, however, twelve o'clock arrived 
 
230 HERE ARE LADIES 
 
 he had journeyed on the hopeful pinions of 
 youth from the dogmatic "could not be" to 
 the equally immovable "is not," and his mind 
 resumed its interrtipted equilibrium. 
 
 At twelve o'clock Mrs. and Miss Mac- 
 Mahon arrived, and were at once shown into 
 the private ofifice. At ten minutes past, Mr. 
 Murphy'^s respectful tap was heard. "Don't, 
 Eddie," said Mrs. MacMahon in a queer, 
 flurried Voice. "Come in," said her husband. 
 Ndrk was examining some judicial calrtbons 
 pinWed over the mantelpiece. Mr. Murphy 
 opened the door a few inches, slid through 
 the aperture, and was at once caught and 
 held by his employer's eye, which, like a 
 hand, guided him to the table with his note- 
 book. Under the almost physical pressure 
 of that authoritative glare he did not dare 
 to look who was in the rbom, but the rim of 
 his eyfe saw the movement of a skirt like the 
 far-away, shadowy canter of a ghost's robe. 
 He fixed his attehtion oh his note-book. 
 
 Mr. MacMahon began to dictate a Deed 
 of Conveyance from a precedent deed in his 
 hand. After dictating for some few min- 
 utes — 
 
 "Murphy," said he, and at the word the 
 ydiing lady studying the cartoons stiffened, 
 
THREE LOVERS WHO LOST231 
 
 "I've rather lost the thread of that clause; 
 please read what you have down." 
 
 Murphy began to read, and, at the first 
 word, the girl made a tiny, shrill, mouse's 
 noise, and then stood stock-still, tightened 
 up and frightened, with her two wild eyes 
 trying to peep around her ears. 
 
 Mr. Murphy heard the noise and faltered 
 — ^he knew instinctively. Something told 
 him with the bellowing assurance of a can- 
 non who was there. He must look. He 
 forced his slack face past the granite image 
 that was his employer, saw a serge-clad fig- 
 ure that he knew, one ear and the curve of 
 a cheek. Then a cascade broke inside his 
 head. It buzzed and chattered and crashed, 
 with now and again the blank brutality of 
 thunder bashing through the noise. The 
 serge-clad figure swelled suddenly to a tre- 
 mendous magnitude, and then it receded just 
 as swiftly, and the vast earth spun minutely 
 on a pin's point ten million miles away, and 
 she was behind it, her eyes piercing with 
 scorn. . . . Through the furious winds 
 that whirled abotit his brain he heard a 
 whisper, thin and cold, and insistent as a 
 razor's edge, "Go on. Murphy; go on, Mur- 
 phy." He strove to fix his attention on his 
 
232 HERE ARE LADIES 
 
 shorthand notes — To fight it down, to 
 stand the shock like a man, and then crawl 
 into a hole somewhere and die ; but his mind 
 would not grip, nor his eyes focus. The 
 only words which his empty brain could 
 pump up were these, irrelevant and idiotic, 
 " 'A frog he would a-wooing go, heigho,' 
 said Rowley"; and they must not be said. 
 "It is a bit difficult, perhaps," said the whis- 
 pering voice that crept through the tumult of 
 winds and waters in his head. "Never 
 mind, take down the rest of it," and the far- 
 away whisper began to say things all about 
 nothing, making queer little noises and 
 pauses, running for a moment into a ripple 
 of sound, and eddying and dying away and 
 coming back again — h\iz-z-z\ His note- 
 book lying on the table was as small as a 
 postage stamp, while the pencil in his hand 
 was as big as an elephant's leg. How can 
 a man write on a microscopic blur with the 
 stump of a fir tree? He poked and prodded, 
 and Mr. MacMahon watched for a few mo- 
 ments his clerk poking his note-book with 
 the wrong end of a pencil. He silently 
 pulled his daughter forward and made her 
 look. After a little— 
 
 "That will do, Murphy," said he, and 
 
THREE LOVERS WHO LOST 233 
 
 Mr. Murphy, before he got out, made two 
 severe attempts to walk through a wall. 
 
 For half an hour he sat at his desk in a 
 trance, with his eyes fixed upon an ink- 
 bottle. At last, nodding his head slowly — 
 
 "I'll bet you a shilling," said he to the 
 ink-bottle, "that I get the sack to-night." 
 
 And the ink-bottle lost the wager. 
 
THE BUND MAN 
 
THE BLIND MAN 
 
 He was one who would have passed by the 
 Sphinx without seeing it. He did not be- 
 lieve in the necessity for sphinxes, or in their 
 reality, for that matter — they did not exist 
 for him. Indeed, he was one to whom the 
 Sphinx would not have been visible. He 
 might have eyed it and noted a certain bulk 
 of grotesque stone, but nothing more sig- 
 nificant. 
 
 He was sex-blind, and, so, peculiarly 
 limited by the fact that he could not appreci- 
 ate women. If he had been pressed for a 
 theory or metaphysic of womanhood he 
 would have been unable to formulate any. 
 Their presence he admitted, perforce : their 
 utility was quite apparent to him on the sur^ 
 face, but, subterraneously, he doubted both 
 their existence and their utility. He might 
 have said perplexedly — Why cannot they do 
 whatever they have to do without being al- 
 ways in the way? He might have said — 
 Hang it, they are everywhere and what good 
 
 237 
 
238 HERE ARE LADIES 
 
 are they doing? They bothered him, they 
 destroyed his ease when he was near thetp, 
 and they spoke a langfuage which he did npt 
 understand and did not want to understand. 
 But as his limitations did not press on him 
 neither did they trouble him. He was not 
 sexually deficient, and he did not dislike 
 women; he simply ignored them, and was 
 only really at home with men. All the 
 crudities which we enumerate as masculine 
 delighted him — simple things, for, in the 
 gender of abstract ideas, vice is feminine, 
 brutality is masculine, the female being 
 older, vastly older than the male, much more 
 competent in every way, stronger, even in 
 her physique, than he, and, having little 
 baggage of mental or ethical preoccupations 
 to delay her progress, she is still the guar- 
 dian of evolution, requiring little more from 
 man than to be stroked and petted for a 
 while. 
 
 He could be brutal at times. He liked to 
 get drunk at seasonable periods. He would 
 cheerfully break a head or a window, and 
 would bandage the one damage or pay for 
 the other with equal skill and pleasure. He 
 liked to tramp rugged miles swinging his 
 arms and whistling as he went, and he could 
 
THE BLIND MAN 239 
 
 sit for hours by the side of a ditch thinking 
 thoughts without words — an easy and a 
 pleasant way of thinking, and one which 
 may lead to something in the long run. 
 
 Even his mother was an abstraction to 
 him. He was kind to her so far as doing 
 things went, but he looked over her, or round 
 her, and marched away and forgot her. 
 
 Sex-blindness carries with it many other 
 darknesses. We do not know what mascu- 
 line thing is projected by the feminine con- 
 sciousness, and civilisation, even life itself, 
 must stand at a halt until that has been dis- 
 covered or created, but art is the female pro- 
 jected by the male : science is the male pro- 
 jected by the male — as yet a poor thing, and 
 to remain so until it has become art ; that is, 
 has become fertilised and so more psycho- 
 logical than mechanical. The small part of 
 science which came to his notice (inven- 
 tions, machinery, etc.) was easily and de- 
 lightedly comprehended by him. He could 
 do intricate things with a knife and a piece 
 of string, or a hammer and a saw : but a pic- 
 ture, a poem, a statue, a piece of music — 
 these left him as uninterested as they found 
 him: more so, in truth, for they left him 
 bored and dejected. 
 
240 HERE ARE LADIES 
 
 His mother came to dislike him, and there 
 were many causes and many justifications 
 for her dislike. She was an orderly, busy, 
 competent woman, the counterpart of end- 
 less millions of her sex, who liked to under- 
 stand what she saw or felt, and who had no 
 happiness in reading riddles. To her he was 
 at times an enigma, and at times again a 
 simpleton. In both aspects he displeased 
 and embarrassed her. One has one's sense 
 of property, and in him she could not put 
 her finger on anything that was hers. We 
 demand continuity, logic in other words, but 
 between her son and herself there was a 
 gulf fixed, spanned by no bridge whatever; 
 there was complete isolation; no boat plied 
 between them at all. All the kindly human 
 things which she loved were unintelligible 
 to him, and his coarse pleasures or blunt 
 evasions distressed and bewildered her. 
 When she spoke to him he gaped or yawned; 
 and yet she did not speak on weighty mat- 
 ters, just the necessary small-change of ex- 
 istence — somebody's cold, somebody's dress, 
 somebody's marriage or death. When she 
 addressed him on sterner subjects, the 
 ground, the weather, the crops, he looked at 
 her as if she were a baby, he listened with 
 
THE BLIND MAN 241 
 
 stubborn resentment, and strode away a con- 
 fessed boor. There was no contact any- 
 where between them, and he was a slow ex- 
 asperation to her. — What can we do with 
 that which is ours and not ours? either we 
 own a thing or we do not, and, whichever 
 way it goes, there is some end to it ; but cer- 
 tain enigmas are illegitimate and are so 
 hounded from decent cogitation. 
 
 She could do nothing but dismiss him, and 
 she could not even do that, for there he was 
 at the required periods, always primed with 
 the wrong reply to any question, the wrong 
 aspiration, the wrong conjecture; a perpet- 
 ual trampler on mental corns, a person for 
 whom one could do nothing but apologise. 
 
 They lived on a small farm and almost the 
 entire work of the place was done by him. 
 His younger brother assisted, but that as- 
 sistance could have easily been done with- 
 out. If the cattle were sick he cured them 
 almost by instinct. If the horse was lame 
 or wanted a new shoe he knew precisely 
 what to do in both events. When the time 
 came for ploughing he gripped the handles 
 and drove a furrow which was as straight 
 and as economical as any furrow in the 
 world. He could dig all day long and be 
 
242 HERE ARE LADIES 
 
 happy; he gathered in the harvest as an- 
 other would gather in a bride; and, in the 
 intervals between these occupations, he fled 
 to the nearest publichouse and wallowed 
 among his kind. 
 
 He did not fly away to drink; he fled to 
 be among men. — Then he awakened. His 
 tongue worked with the best of them, and 
 adequately too. He could speak weightily 
 on many things — ^boxing, wrestling, hunt- 
 ing, fishing, the seasons, the weather, and 
 the chances of this and the other man's 
 crops. He had deep knowledge about brands 
 of tobacco and the peculiar virtues of many 
 diflferent liquors. He knew birds and beetles 
 and worms ; how a weazel would behave in 
 extraordinary circumstances; how to train 
 every breed of horse and dog. He recited 
 goats from the cradle to the grave, could 
 tell the name of any tree from its leaf; knew 
 how a bull could be coerced, a cow cut up, 
 and what plasters were good for a broken 
 head. Sometimes, and often enough, the 
 talk would chance on women, and then he 
 laughed as heartily as any one else, but he 
 was always relieved when the conversation 
 trailed to. more interesting things. 
 
 His mother died and left the farm to the 
 
THE BUND MAN 243 
 
 younger instead of the elder son; an un- 
 usual thing to do, but she did detest him. 
 She knew her younger son very well. He 
 was foreign to her in nothing. His temper 
 ran parallel with her own, his tastes were 
 hers, his ideas had been largely derived from 
 her, she could track them at any time and 
 make or demolish him. He would go to a 
 dance or a picnic and be as exhilarated as 
 she was, and would discuss the matter after- 
 wards. He could speak with some cogency 
 on the shape of this and that female person, 
 the hat of such an one, the disagreeableness 
 of tea at this house and the goodness of it at 
 the other. He could even listen to one 
 speaking without going to sleep at the fourth 
 word. In all he was a decent, quiet lad who 
 would become a father the exact replica of 
 his own, and whose daughters would re- 
 semble his mother as closely as two peas re- 
 semble their green ancestors. — So she left 
 him the farm. 
 
 Of course, there was no attempt to turn 
 the elder brother out. Indeed, for some 
 years the two men worked quietly together 
 and prospered and were contented; then, as 
 was inevitable, the younger brother got 
 married, and the elder had to look out for 
 
244 HERE ARE LADIES 
 
 a new place to live in, and to work in — things 
 had become difficult. 
 
 It is very easy to say that in such and 
 such circumstances a man should do this and 
 that well-pondered thing, but the courts of 
 logic have as yet the most circumscribed 
 jurisdiction. Just as statistics can prove 
 anything and be quite wrong, so reason can 
 sit in its padded chair issuing pronounce- 
 ments which are seldom within measurable 
 distance of any reality. Everything is true 
 only in relation to its centre of thought. 
 Some people think with their heads — their 
 subsequent actions are as logical and un- 
 pleasant as are those of the other sort who 
 think only with their blood, and this latter 
 has its irrefutable logic also. He thought in 
 this subterranean fashion, and if he had 
 thought in the other the issue would not 
 have been any different. 
 
 Still, it was not an easy problem for him, 
 or for any person lacking initiative — a sex- 
 ual characteristic. He might have emigrated, 
 but his roots were deeply struck in his own 
 place, so the idea never occurred to him; 
 furthermore, our thoughts are often no 
 deeper than our pockets, and one wants 
 money to move anywhere. For any other 
 
THE BLIND MAN 245 
 
 life than that of farming he had no training 
 and small desire. He had no money and 
 he was a farmer's son. Without money he 
 could not get a farm; being a farmer's son 
 he could not sink to the degradation of a day 
 labourer ; logically he could sink, actually he 
 could not without endangering his own cen- 
 tres and verities — so he also got married. 
 
 He married a farm of about ten acres, and 
 the sun began to shine on him once more; 
 but only for a few days. Suddenly the sun 
 went away from the heavens ; the moon dis- 
 appeared from the silent night; the silent 
 night itself fled afar, leaving in its stead a 
 noisy, dirty blackness through which one 
 slept or yawned as one could. There was 
 the farm, of course, one could go there and 
 work; but the freshness went out of the 
 very ground; the crops lost their sweetness 
 and candour ; the horses and cows disowned 
 him; the goats ceased to be his friends — It 
 was all up with him. He did not whistle 
 any longer. He did not swing his shoulders 
 as he walked, and, although he continued xo 
 smoke, he did not look for a particular green 
 bank whereon he could sit quietly flooded 
 with those slow thoughts that had no words. 
 
 For he discovered that he had not mar- 
 
246 HERE ARE LADIES 
 
 ried a farm at all. He had married a woman 
 — a thin-jawed, elderly slattern, whose sole 
 beauty was her farm. How her jaws 
 worked! The processions and congrega- 
 tions of words that fell and dribbled and slid 
 out of them ! Those jaws were never quiet, 
 and in spite of all he did not say anything. 
 There was not anything to say, but much to 
 do from which he shivered away in terror. 
 He looked at her sometimes through the 
 muscles of his arms, through his big, strong 
 hands, through fogs and fumes and singu- 
 lar, quiet tumults that raged within him. 
 She lessoned him on the things he knew so 
 well, and she was always wrong. She lec- 
 tured him on those things which she did 
 know, but the unending disquisition, the 
 perpetual repetition, the foolish, empty em- 
 phasis, the dragging weightiness of her 
 tongue made him repudiate her knowledge 
 and hate it as much as he did her. 
 
 Sometimes, looking at her, he would rub 
 his eyes and yawn with fatigue and wonder 
 — there she was ! A something enwrapped 
 about with petticoats. Veritably alive. Ac- 
 tive as an insect! Palpable to the touch! 
 And what was she doing to him ? Why did 
 she do it ? Why didn't she go away ? Why 
 
THE BUND MAN 247 
 
 didn't she die ? What sense was there in the 
 making of such a creature that clothed it- 
 self like a bolster, without any freedom or 
 entertainment or shapeliness? 
 
 Her eyes were fixed on him and they 
 always seemed to be angry; and her tongue 
 was uttering rubbish about horses, rubbish 
 about cows, rubbish about hay and oats. 
 Nor was this the sum of his weariness. It 
 was not alone that he was married; he was 
 multitudinously, egregiously married. He 
 had married a whole family, and what a 
 family — 
 
 Her mother lived with her, her eldest 
 sister lived with her, her youngest sister 
 lived with her — and these were all swathed 
 about with petticoats and shawls. They 
 had no movement. Their feet were like 
 those of no creature he had ever observed. 
 One could hear the flip-flap of their slippers 
 all over the place, and at all hours. They 
 were down-at-heel, draggle-tailed, and fu- 
 tile. There was no workmanship about 
 them. They were as unfinished, as unsight- 
 ly as a puddle on a road. They insulted his 
 eyesight, his hearing, and his energy. They 
 had lank hair that slapped about them like 
 
248 HERE ARE LADIES 
 
 wet seaweed, and they were all talking, talk- 
 ing, talking. 
 
 The mother was of an incredible age. She 
 was senile with age. Her cracked cackle 
 never ceased for an instant. She talked to 
 the dog and the cat; she talked to the walls 
 of the room ; she spoke out through the win- 
 dow to the weather; she shut her eyes in a 
 corner and harangued the circumambient 
 darkness. The eldest sister was as silent as 
 a deep ditch and as ugly. She slid here and 
 there with her head on one side like an in- 
 quisitive hen watching one curiously, and 
 was always doing nothing with an air of 
 futile employment. The youngest was a 
 semi-lunatic who prattled and prattled with- 
 out ceasing, and was always catching one's 
 sleeve, and laughing at one's face. — And 
 everywhere those flopping, wriggling petti- 
 coats were appearing and disappearing. One 
 saw slack hair whisking by the corner of 
 one's eye. Mysteriously, urgently, they 
 were coming and going and coming again, 
 and never, never being silent. 
 
 More and more he went running to the 
 public-house. But it was no longer to be 
 among men, it was to get drunk. One might 
 
THE BUND MAN 249 
 
 imagine him sitting there thinking those slow 
 thoughts without words. One might pre- 
 dict that the day would come when he 
 would realise very suddenly, very clearly all 
 that he had been thinking about, and, when 
 this urgent, terrible thought had been trans- 
 lated into its own terms of action, he would 
 be quietly hanged by the neck until he was 
 as dead as he had been before he was alive. 
 
SWEET-APPLE 
 
 At the end of the bough, at the top of the tree 
 (As fragrant, as high, and as lovely as thou) 
 One sweet apple reddens which all men may see, 
 At the end of the bough. 
 
 Swinging full to the view, tho' the gatherers now 
 
 Pass, and evade, and o'erlook busily: 
 
 Overlook! nay, but pluck it! they cannot tell how. 
 
 For it swings out of reach as a cloud, and as free 
 As a star, or thy beauty, which seems too, I vow, 
 Remote as the sweet rosy apple — ah me! 
 At the end of the bough. 
 
THREE HAPPY PLACES 
 
THREE HAPPY PLACES 
 
 One awakened suddenly in those days. Sleep 
 was not followed by the haze which trails 
 behind more mature slumbers. One's eyes 
 opened wide and bright, and brains and legs 
 became instantly active. If by a chance the 
 boy lying next to you was still asleep, it was 
 the thing to hit him with a pillow. Even 
 among boys, however, there are certain 
 morose creatures who are ill-tempered in the 
 morning, and these, on being struck with a 
 pillow, become malignantly active, and de- 
 sire to fight with fists instead of pillows. 
 
 Bull was such a boy. He was densely 
 packed with pugnacity. He lived for ever 
 on the extreme slope of a fight, down which 
 he slid at a word, a nod, a wink, into strenu- 
 ous and bloodthirsty warfare. He was never 
 seen without a black eye, a bruised lip, or 
 something wrong with his ear. He had the 
 most miscellaneous collection of hurts that 
 
 255 
 
2S6 HERE ARE LADIES 
 
 one could imagine, and he was always pre- 
 pared to exhibit his latest injury in ex- 
 change for a piece of toffee. If this method 
 of barter was not relished, he would hit the 
 proprietor of the toffee and confiscate the 
 goods to his own use. 
 
 His knowledge of who had sweets was 
 uncanny. He had an extra sense in that 
 direction, which was a trouble to all smaller 
 boys. No matter how cunningly one con- 
 cealed a sticky treasure, just when one was 
 secretly enjoying it he came leaping out of 
 space with the most offensive friendliness 
 crinkling all over his face, and his desire to 
 participate in the confection was advanced 
 without any preliminary courtesies — 
 
 "What have you got? Show! Give us 
 a bit. Can't you give a fellow a bit?" 
 
 When the bit was tendered he snatched it, 
 swallowed it, and growled — 
 
 "Do you call that a bit? Give us a real 
 bit." 
 
 There are plenty of boys who will defend 
 their toffee with their lives. Such boys he 
 liked to meet, for their refusal to surrender 
 a part gave him an opportunity to fight and 
 a reason for confiscating the whole of the 
 ravished sweetmeat. One often had to de- 
 
THREE HAPPY PLACES 257 
 
 vour one's sweets at a full gallop. It was 
 no uncommon thing to see a small boy scud- 
 ding furiously around a field with Bull 
 pounding behind, intent as a bloodhound, 
 and as horribly vocal. A close examination 
 would discover that the small boy's jaws 
 were moving with even greater rapidity than 
 his legs. If he managed to get his stuff de- 
 voured before he was caught it was all 
 right, but he got hammered anyhow when 
 he was caught. However, Bull's approach 
 was usually managed with great skill and 
 strategy, and before the small boy was 
 aware Bull was squatting beside him using 
 blandishments both moral and minatory. 
 
 He was a very gifted boy. He had no 
 bent for learning lessons but he had a great 
 gift for collecting and turning to his own 
 use the property of other people. Some- 
 times three or four boys swore a Solemn 
 League and Covenant against him. His 
 perplexity then was extreme. He saw tof- 
 fee being devoured and none of it coming his 
 way. Possibly his method of thinking was 
 in pictures, and he could visualise with pain- 
 ful clarity the alien gullets down which tof- 
 fee was traveling, and, simultaneously, he 
 could see the woeful emptiness of his own 
 
258 HERE ARE LADIES 
 
 red lane. He must have felt that all was 
 not right with a Providence which could al- 
 low such happenings. A world wherein there 
 was toffee for others and none for him was 
 certainly a world out of joint. His idea 
 of Utopia would be a place where there were 
 lots of things for him to eat and a circle of 
 hungry boys who watched his deliberate 
 jaws with envy and humility. Furthermore, 
 the idea that smaller boys could have, not 
 the courage, but the heart to congregate 
 against him, must have come to him with a 
 shock. He was appalled by a sense of the 
 sinfulness of human nature, and dismayed 
 by the odds against which virtue has to fight. 
 The others, strong in numbers, followed 
 him on such occasions chewing their tuck 
 with grave deliberation, descanting minutely 
 and loudly on the taste of each bit, the splen- 
 did length of time it took to dissolve, and the 
 blessedly large quantity which yet remained 
 to be eaten. He threatened them, but his 
 threats were received with yawns. He 
 wheedled (a thing he could do consummately 
 well) but they were not to be blandished. 
 He mapped out on his own person the par- 
 ticular and painful places where later on he 
 would hit them unless he was bound over to 
 
THREE HAPPY PLACES 259 
 
 the peace by toffee. And they sucked their 
 sweetstuff and made diagrams on each other 
 of the places where they could hit Bull if 
 they had a mind to, and told each other and 
 him that he was not worth hitting alid, 
 would probably die if he were hit. But 
 they were careful not dissolve partnership 
 until the sweets were eaten and beyond even 
 the wildest hopes of salvage. Then, in the 
 later-on that had been predicted. Bull cap- 
 tured them in detail, and, as he had prom- 
 ised, he "lammed the stuffing" out of them. 
 He had all the grave wisdom of the stupid, 
 and the extraordinary energy and persist- 
 ence which perpetuates them. He never 
 could learn a lesson, but he could, and did, 
 pinch the boy next to him into adept prompt- 
 ing, and would intimidate any one into do- 
 ing his sums. Indeed, the man of whom he 
 was the promise had no need for ordinary 
 learning. The lighter accomplishments of 
 life had no appeal, nor would the deeper les- 
 sons have any meaning for him. He is 
 simply a big, physical appetite, untrammelled 
 by anything like introspection or conscience, 
 and working in perfect innocence for the ful- 
 filment of its simple wants. For at base his 
 species are surely the most simple of human 
 
26o HERE ARE LADIES 
 
 creatures. In spite of their complex physi- 
 cal structure they are one-celled organisms 
 driven through life with only a passionate 
 hunger as their motive power, and with no 
 complexities of thought or emotion to ham- 
 per their loud progressions. None but those 
 of their own kind can suffer from their 
 ravages, and, even so, they fly the contact of 
 each other with horror. 
 
 Doubtless by this time Bull is a prosperous 
 and wealthy citizen somewhere, the proprie- 
 tor of a curved waistcoat and a gold watch. 
 Possessions other than these he would re- 
 gard with the amiable tolerance of a phi- 
 losopher regarding a child with toys. So 
 strongly acquisitive a nature must win the 
 particular little battles which it is fitted to 
 wage. When a conscienceless mind is but- 
 tressed by a pugnacious temperament then 
 houses and land, and cattle and maidserv- 
 ants, and such-like, the small change of ex- 
 istence, are easily gotten. 
 
n 
 
 The sunlight of youth has a special qual- 
 ity which will never again be known until 
 we rediscover it in Paradise. What a time 
 it was ! How the sun shone, and how often 
 it shone! I remember playing about in a 
 parched and ragged field with a leaf from a 
 copy-book stuck under my cap to aid its 
 quarter-inch peak in keeping off the glare of 
 that tremendous sunshine. 
 
 Tip-and-Tig, Horneys and Robbers, Re- 
 lievo we played, and another game, the name 
 of which did not then seem at all strange, 
 but which now wears an amazing appearance 
 — it was. Twenty-four Yards on the Billy- 
 Goat's Tail. I wonder now what was that 
 Billy-Goat, and was he able to wag the tri- 
 umphant tail of which twenty- four yards was 
 probably no more than an inconsiderable 
 moiety. There were other games: Ball-in- 
 the-Decker, Cap-on-the-Back, and Towns or 
 Rounders. These were all summer games. 
 
 With the lightest effort of imagination I 
 261 
 
262 HERE ARE LADIES 
 
 can see myself and other tireless atoms 
 scooting across reaches of sunlight. I can 
 hear the continuous howl which accompanied 
 our play, and can see that ragged, parched 
 field spreading, save for the cluster of boys, 
 wide and silent to the further, greener fields, 
 where the cows were lying down in great 
 coloured lumps, and one antic deer, a pet, 
 would make such astonishing journeys, 
 jumping the entire circuit of the field on four 
 thin and absolutely rigid legs; for when it 
 made these peculiar excursions it never 
 seemed to use its legs — these were held quite 
 rigidly, and the deer bounded by some pow- 
 erful, spring-like action, its brown coat flash- 
 ing in the sunlight, and its movement a 
 rhythmic glory which the boys watched with 
 ecstasy and laughter. 
 
 An old ass was native to that field also. 
 He had been a bright, kind-hearted donkey 
 at one time : a donkey whose nose might be 
 tickled, and who would allow one to climb 
 upon his back. But the presence of boys 
 grew disturbing as he grew old, and the prac- 
 tical jokes of which his youth took no heed 
 induced a kind of insanity in his latter age. 
 He took to kicking the cows as they browsed 
 peacefully, and, later, he developed a horrid 
 
THREE HAPPY PLACES 263 
 
 appetite for fowl, and would stalk and kill 
 and eat hens whenever possible. Later still 
 he directed this unhealthy appetite towards 
 small boys, and after he had eaten part of 
 one lad's shoulder and the calf from another 
 boy's leg he disappeared — whether he was 
 sold to some innocent person, or had been 
 slaughtered mysteriously, we did not know. 
 We professed to believe that he had died of 
 the horrible taste of the boys he had bitten, 
 and, afterwards, whenever we played canni- 
 bals, we refused, greatly to their chagrin, to 
 kill and eat these two boys, on the ground 
 that their flesh was poisonous ; but the others 
 we slaughtered and fed on with undimin- 
 ished gusto. 
 
 There were only two trees in the field — 
 great, gnarled monsters casting a deep shade. 
 In that shade the grass grew long and green 
 and juicy. After a game the boys would 
 fling themselves down in the shadow of the 
 trees to chew the sweet grass, and play 
 "knifey," and talk. — Such talk! — endless and 
 careless, and loud as the converse of young 
 bulls. What did we talk about? Delightful 
 and inconsequent shoutings — 
 
 "That is a hawk up there, he's going to 
 soar. How does he keep so steady without 
 
264 HERE ARE LADIES 
 
 moving his wings? Watch now! down he 
 drops like a stone. ... If you give your 
 rabbit too many cabbage leaves he'll die of 
 the gripes. . . . Did you ever play jack- 
 stones? a fellow showed me how, look! . . . 
 When we were at the sea yesterday Jimmy 
 Nelson wouldn't go out from the shore. He 
 was afraid of his life — ^he wouldn't even 
 duck down. I swam nearly out of sight, 
 didn't I, Sam ? So did Sam. . . . You could 
 climb right up to the top of that tree if you 
 tried. No you couldn't. — Yes I could, it's 
 forked all the way up. . . . The new master 
 wears specs — Old Four-Eyes! and he grins 
 at a fellow. I don't think he's much . . . 
 How do midges get born? . . . My brother 
 has one with four blades and a thing for pok- 
 ing stones out of a horse's hoof. ... A 
 horse-hair won't break the cane at all: it's 
 all bosh : rosin is the only thing. ..." 
 
 There was a little stream which twisted a 
 six-foot path through the field, the sunshine 
 dashing off its waters in brilliant flashes. 
 The top of the water swarmed with flying 
 insects and strange, small spider-things 
 skimmed over its surface with amazing 
 swiftness. We believed there were otters in 
 that stream — they came out at nightfall and, 
 
THREE HAPPY PLACES 265 
 
 unless you had the good fortune to be res- 
 cued by a Newfoundland dog, they would 
 hold you down under water until you were 
 drowned. We also held there were leeches 
 in the stream — they would grip you by the 
 hundred thousand and suck you to death in 
 five minutes, and they clung so tightly that 
 one could not prise their mouths open with 
 a poker. We hoped there were whales in it, 
 but not one of us desired a shark because it 
 is the Sailor's Enemy. 
 
 An iron railing ran by part of the field. 
 Every hole and joint of it was crammed with 
 earwigs, and these could be poked out of the 
 crevices with a straw. When an amazing 
 number of them had been poked out there 
 was always another one left. The very last 
 earwig that could be discovered was the 
 King. He was able and willing to bite ten 
 times as badly as any of the others, and he 
 was awfully vicious when his nest was 
 broken into. Furthermore, he had the abil- 
 ity to put a curse on you before he died, 
 and he always did this because he was so 
 vicious. If a King Earwig had time to curse 
 you before he was killed terrible things 
 might happen. His favourite curse was to 
 translate himself into the next piece of bread 
 
266 HERE ARE LADIES 
 
 you would eat, and then you would see one- 
 half of him waggling in a hole in the bread : 
 the other half you had already eaten. — For 
 this reason the King Earwig was always al- 
 lowed to go free until he was not looking, 
 then he was killed with great suddenness. 
 
 I remember how the slow evening shadows 
 drew over the quiet fields. The sunlight 
 slowly faded to a mist of gold, into which 
 the great trees thrust timorous, shy fingers, 
 and these gradually widened, until, at last, 
 the whole horizon bowed into the twilight. 
 
 Across the field there could be heard the 
 voice of the river, a furtive, desolate hoarse- 
 ness in the dusk. The cows in the far fields 
 had long ago wandered home to be milked, 
 scarcely a bird moved in the high silences, 
 the gnats had hidden themselves away in the 
 deep, rugged bark of the trees, and, through 
 the dimness, the heavy beetles were hurling 
 like stones, and dropping and rising again in 
 a laborious flight. 
 
Ill 
 
 H^ could remember that he had wept to be 
 allowed go to school. Even more vivid was 
 his recollection of the persuasive and per- 
 sistent tears which he had shed to be allowed 
 to stay at home. 
 
 Most of the joys of school were exhausted 
 after he had submitted to one hour of dreary 
 discipline. — ^To be compelled to sit still when 
 every inch of one's being clamoured to move 
 about; to have to stand up and stare at a 
 blackboard upon which meaningless white 
 scrawls were perpetually being drawn, and 
 as perpetually being wiped out to a master's 
 meaningless, monotonous verbal accompani- 
 ment ; to have to join in a chant which began 
 with "a, b, c," and droned steadily through 
 a complexity of sounds to a ridiculously in- 
 adequate "z" — such things became desper- 
 ately boring. One was not even let go to 
 sleep, and if one wept from sheer ennui, then 
 one was clouted. School, he shortly decided, 
 was not worth anybody's while, but he also 
 
 267 
 
268 HERE ARE LADIES 
 
 discovered that a torment had commenced 
 which was not by any artifice to be evaded. 
 
 Along the road to school there ran a suc- 
 cession of meadows — the path was really a 
 footway through fields — and how not to 
 stray into these meadows was a problem de- 
 manding the entire of one's attention. Some- 
 times a rabbit bolted almost from under one's 
 feet — it flapped away through the grass, 
 and bobbed up and down in a great hurry. 
 Then his heart filled with envy. He said 
 to himself — 
 
 "That rabbit is not going to school : if it 
 was it wouldn't run so quickly." 
 
 It was paltry comfort to hurl a wad of 
 grass after it. 
 
 Through most of the journey there was an 
 immense, lazy bee with a bass voice, and he 
 droned defiance three feet away from one's 
 cap which almost jolted to be put over him. 
 He seemed to understand that at such an 
 hour he was not in any danger, and so he 
 would drop to the grass, roll on his back, 
 and cock up his legs in ecstasy. 
 
 "Bees," said he to himself in amazement 
 and despair, "do not go to school." 
 
 Each bush and tree seemed, for the mo- 
 ment, to be inhabited by a bird whose song 
 
THREE HAPPY PLACES 269 
 
 was unfamiliar and the markings on whom 
 he could not remember to have seen before ; 
 and he had no time to stay and note them. 
 He dragged beyond these objects reluctantly, 
 pondering on the unreasonable savagery of 
 parents who sent one to school when the sun 
 was shining. 
 
 But the greatest obstacle to getting to 
 school was the river which danced briskly 
 through the fields. The footpath went for a 
 stretch along this stream, and, during that 
 piece of the journey, haste was not possible. 
 There are so many things in a river to look 
 at. The movement of the water in itself 
 exercises fascinations over a boy. There are 
 always bubbles, based strongly in froth, sail- 
 ing gallantly along. — One speculates how 
 long a bubble will swim before it hits a rock, 
 or is washed into nothing by an eddy, or is 
 becalmed in a sheltered corner to ride at 
 jaunty anchor with a navy of similar deli- 
 cate tonnage. 
 
 Further, if one finds a twig on the path, 
 or a leaf, there is nothing more natural than 
 to throw these into the river and see how 
 fast or how erratically they sail. Pebbles 
 also clamour to be cast into the stream. 
 Perhaps a dragon-fly whirls above the sur- 
 
270 HERE ARE LADIES 
 
 face of the water to hold one late from 
 school. The grasses and rushes by the 
 marge may stir as a grey rat slips out to 
 take to the water and swim low down and 
 very fast on some strange and important 
 journey. The inspection of such an event 
 cannot be hurried. One must, if it is possi- 
 ble, discover where he swims to, and if his 
 hole is found it has to be blocked up with 
 stones, even though the persistent bell is 
 clanging down over the fields. 
 
 Perhaps a big frog will push out from the 
 grass and go in fat leaps down to the water 
 — ^plop ! and away he swims with his sarcas- 
 tic nose up and his legs going like fury. 
 The strange, very-little-boy motions of a 
 frog in water is a thing to ponder over. 
 There are small frogs also, every bit as in- 
 teresting, thin-legged, round-bellied anato- 
 mies who try to jump two ways at once when 
 they are observed, and are caught so easily 
 that it is scarcely worth one's trouble to 
 chase them at all. 
 
 Just where the path turned there was an 
 arch under which the river flowed. — It was 
 covered in with an iron grating. Surely it 
 was a place of mystery. Through the bars 
 the dark, swirling waters were dimly visible 
 
THREE HAPPY PLACES 271 
 
 — there were things in there. Black lumps 
 rose out of the water, and, for a little dis- 
 tance, the slimy, shimmering, cold-looking 
 walls could be seen. Beyond there was a 
 deeper gloom, and, beyond that again, a 
 blank, mysterious darkness. Through the 
 grating the voice of the stream came back 
 with a strange note. On the outside, under 
 the sun, it was a tinkle and a rush, a dance 
 indeed, but within it was a low snarl that 
 deepened to a grim whisper. There was 
 an edge of malice to the sound: something 
 dark and very terrible brooded on the face 
 of those hidden waters. It was the home 
 of surmise. — What might there not be there? 
 There might be gully-holes where the waters 
 whirled in wide circles, and then flew 
 smoothly down, and down, and down. If 
 one could have got in there to see ! To crawl 
 along by the slippery edge in the darkness 
 and solitude ! It was very hard to get away 
 from this place. 
 
 A little farther on two goats were teth- 
 ered. As one passed they would cease to 
 pluck the grass and begin to dance slowly, 
 such dainty, antic steps, with their heads 
 held down and their pale eyes looking up- 
 wards with a joke in them. They did not 
 
272 HERE ARE LADIES 
 
 really want to fight; they wanted to play 
 but were too shy to admit it. 
 
 And here the schoolhouse was in sight. 
 The bell had stopped: it was now time to 
 run. 
 
 He gripped the mouth of his satchel with 
 one hand to prevent the lesson books from 
 jumping out as he ran, he gripped his pocket 
 with the other hand to prevent his lunch 
 from being jolted into the road. 
 
 Another few yards and he was at the gate 
 — some one was glaring out through a win- 
 dow. It was a big face rimmed with spec- 
 tacles and whiskers — a. master. He knew 
 that when yonder severe eye had lifted from 
 him it had dropped to look at a watch, and 
 he also knew exactly what the owner of the 
 severe eye would say to him as he sidled in. 
 
THE MOON 
 
 If the Moon had a hand 
 I wonder would she 
 Stretch it down unto me? 
 
 If she did, I would go 
 
 To her glacier land. 
 
 To her ice-covered strand. 
 
 I would run, I would fly. 
 Were the cold ever so, 
 And be warm in the snow. 
 
 O Moon of all Light, 
 Sailing far, sailing high 
 In the infinite sky. 
 
 Do not come down to me. 
 Lest I shriek in affright. 
 Lest I die in the night 
 Of your chill ecstasy. 
 
THERE IS A TAVERN IN THE TOWN 
 
THERE IS A TAVERN IN THE TOWN 
 
 The old gentleman entered, and was about 
 to sit down, when a button became detached 
 from some portion of his raiment and rolled 
 upon the floor. He picked the button up and 
 observed that he would keep it for his house- 
 keeper to sew on, and, while speaking on the 
 strangeness of housekeeping and buttons, he 
 came slowly to the subject of matrimony — 
 
 "Like so many other customs," said he, 
 "marriage is not native to the human race, 
 nor is it altogether peculiar to it. So far as 
 I am aware no person was ever born married, 
 and in extreme youth bachelors and spin- 
 sters are so common as to call for no re- 
 mark. Nature strives, not for duality as in 
 the case of the Siamese Twins but for in- 
 dividuality. We are all born strongly sep- 
 arated, and I am often inclined to fancy 
 that this ceremony of joining appears very 
 
 277 
 
278 HERE ARE LADIES 
 
 like flying in the face of Providence. I 
 have also thought, on the other hand, that 
 the segregation of humanity into male and 
 female is not an economic practice, but I 
 fear the foundation of the sex habit is by 
 this time so deeply trenched in our natures 
 as to be practically ineradicable. 
 
 "Throughout nature the male and female 
 habit is usual : all beasts are born of one or 
 the other gender, and this is also the case in 
 the vegetable kingdom : but I am not aware 
 that the ridiculous and wasteful preparations 
 with which we encumber matrimony obtain 
 also among plants and animals. Certainly, 
 among some animals courtship, as we under- 
 stand it, is practised — Wolves, for instance, 
 are an extraordinarily acute people who 
 make good husbands and fathers, and in 
 these relations they display a tenderness and 
 courtesy which one only acquainted with 
 their out-of-door manners would scarcely 
 credit them with. Their courtship is con- 
 ducted under circumstances of extraordinary 
 rigour. A he-wolf who becomes enamoured 
 of a female from another tribe is forced, in 
 attempting to wed her, to set his life upon 
 the venture, and, disdaining all the fury of 
 her numerous relatives, he must forcibly de- 
 
TAVERN IN THE TOWN 279 
 
 tach her from her family, kill or maim all 
 her other suitors, sustain in a wounded and 
 desperate condition a prolonged chase over 
 the snow-clad Russian Steppes, and, ulti- 
 mately, consummate his nuptials, if he can, 
 with as many limbs as his lady's family have 
 failed to collect off him. This is a courtship 
 admirably fitted to evolve a hardy and Spar- 
 tan race strong in the virtues of reliance and 
 self-control. 
 
 "Spiders, on the other hand, are a people 
 whom I despise on several counts, but must 
 admire on others. They conduct their love 
 affairs in an even more tragic style. In 
 every event matrimony is a tragedy, but in 
 the case of spiders it is a catastrophe. Spi- 
 ders are a very sour and pessimistic people 
 who live in walls, corners of hotel bedrooms 
 and holes generally, in which places they 
 weave very delicate webs, and sit for a long 
 period in a state of philosophic ecstasy, con- 
 templating-the infinite. Their principal pas- 
 times are killing flies and committing sui- 
 cide — both of which games should be encour- 
 aged. Like so many other unhappy crea- 
 tures they are born with a gender from 
 which there is no escape. The male spider 
 is very much smaller than the female, and 
 
28o HERE ARE LADIES 
 
 he does not care greatly for his life. When 
 he does not desire to live any longer he com- 
 mits matrimony or suicide. He weds a large 
 and fierce wife, who, when in expectation of 
 progeny, kills him, and, being a thorough- 
 going person as all females are, she also eats 
 him, possibly at his own request, and thus 
 she relieves her husband of the tedium of 
 existence and herself of the necessity for 
 seeking immediate victual. I do not know 
 whether male spiders are very plentiful or 
 extremely scarce, but I cite this as an ex- 
 ample of the extravagance and economy of 
 the female gender. 
 
 "Of the courting habits of fish I have 
 scanty knowledge. Fish are very ugly, dirty 
 creatures who appear to live entirely in 
 water, and they have been known to follow 
 a ship for miles in the disgusting hope of 
 garbage being thrown to them by the stew- 
 ard. Their chief pastime is weighing each 
 other, for which purpose they are liberally 
 provided with scales. They can be captured 
 by nets, or rods and lines, or, when they are 
 cockles, they can be captured by the human 
 hand, but, in this latter case, they cannot be 
 tamed, having very little intelligence. The 
 cockle has no scale, and feels the deprivation 
 
TAVERN IN THE TOWN 281 
 
 keenly, hiding himself deep in the sea and 
 seldom venturing forth except at night-time- 
 He is composed of two shells and a soft 
 piece, is chiefly useful for poisoning children 
 and is found at Sandymount, a place where 
 nobody but a cockle would live. Other fish 
 may be generally described as, crabs, pink- 
 eens, red herrings and whales. How these 
 conduct their matrimonial adventures I do 
 not know — the statement that whales are 
 fond of pinkeens is true only in a food sense, 
 for these races have never been observed to 
 intermarry. 
 
 "A great many creatures capture or capti- 
 vate their mates by singing. — These are usu- 
 ally, but not always, birds, and include wily 
 wagtails, larks, canary birds and the crested 
 earwig. Poets, music hall comedians and 
 cats may also be included in this category. 
 Dogs are imperative and dashing wooers, but 
 they seldom sing. Peacocks expand their 
 tails before the astonished gaze of their 
 brides, showing how the female sex is over- 
 borne by minor, unimportant advantages. 
 Frogs, I believe, make love in the dark, 
 which is a wise thing for them to do — they 
 are very witty folk, but confirmed sentimen- 
 tahsts. Grocers' assistants attract their 
 
283 HERE ARE LADIES 
 
 mates by exposing very tall collars and 
 brown boots. Drapers' assistants follow 
 suit, with the comely addition of green socks 
 and an umbrella — they are never known to 
 fail. Some creatures do not marry at all. 
 At a certain period they break in two halves, 
 and each half, fully equipped for existence, 
 waggles away from the other. — They are the 
 only perfectly happy folk of whom I am 
 aware. For myself, I was born single and 
 I will remain so, I will never be a slave to 
 the disgusting habit of matrimony." 
 
 Having said this with great firmness, the 
 old gentleman shed two more buttons from 
 his waistcoat, and, after sticking three nails 
 and a piece of twine through his garments, 
 he departed very happily. The gentleman- 
 in-waiting sneezed three times in a loud 
 voice, and gave a war-whoop, but I took no 
 notice of these impertinences. 
 
II 
 
 I HAD not seen the old gentleman for a long 
 time, and when he entered with one foot in 
 a boot and the other in a carpet slipper, I 
 was overjoyed. When the bubbling tankard 
 which I had ordered was placed before him 
 he seized my two hands, wrung them heartily 
 and dashed into the following subject — 
 
 "It must be remembered," said he, "that 
 dancing is not an art but a pastime, and 
 should, therefore, be freed from the too- 
 burdensome regulations wherewith an art is 
 encumbered. An art is a highly-specialised 
 matter hedged in on every side by intellectual 
 policemen, a pastime is not specialised, and 
 never takes place in the presence of police- 
 men, who are well known to be the sworn 
 enemies of gaiety. For example, theology is 
 an art but religion is a pastime : we learn the 
 collects only under compulsion, but we sing 
 anthems because it is pleasant to do so. 
 Thus, eating oysters is an art by dint of the 
 
 283 
 
284 HERE ARE LADIES 
 
 elaborate ceremonial including shell-openers, 
 lemons, waiters and pepper, which must be 
 grouped around your oyster before you can 
 conveniently swallow him, but eating nuts, or 
 blackberries, or a privily-acquired turnip — 
 these are pastimes. 
 
 "The practice of dancing is of an un- 
 doubted antiquity. History teems with ref- 
 erence to this custom, but it is difficult to 
 discover what nationality or what era first 
 witnessed its evolution. I myself believe 
 that the first dance was performed by a do- 
 mestic hen who found an ostrich's egg, and 
 bounded before Providence in gratitude for 
 something worthy of being sat upon, 
 
 "In all places and in all ages dancing has 
 been utilised as a first-aid to language. The 
 function of language is intellectual, that of 
 dancing is emotional. It is scarcely possible 
 to say anything of an emotional nature in 
 words without adventuring into depths or 
 bogs of sentimentality from which one can 
 only emerge greasy with dishonour. When 
 we are happy we cannot say so with any 
 degree of intelligibility: in such a context 
 the spoken word is miserably inadequate, and 
 must be supplemented by some bodily antic. 
 If we are merry we must skip to be under- 
 
TAVERN IN THE TOWN 285 
 
 stood. If we are happy we must dance. If 
 we are wildly and ecstatically joyous then 
 we will become creators, and some new and 
 beneficent dance-movements will be added to 
 the repertory of our neighborhood. 
 
 "Children will dance upon the slightest 
 provocation, so also do lambs and goats; 
 but policemen, and puckauns, and advertise- 
 ment agents, and fish do not dance at all, 
 and this is because they have hard hearts. 
 Worms and Members of Parliament, be- 
 tween whom, in addition to their high gen- 
 eral culture, there is a singular and subtle 
 correspondence, do not dance, because the in- 
 elastic quality of their environment forbids 
 anything in the nature of freedom. Frogs, 
 dogs, and very young mountains do dance. 
 
 "A frog is a most estimabh person. He 
 has a cold body but a warm heart, and a 
 countenance of almost parental benevolence, 
 and the joy of life moves him to an almost 
 ceaseless activity. I can never observe a 
 frog on a journey without fancying that his 
 gusto for travel is directed by a philanthropic 
 impulse towards the bedside of a sick friend 
 or a meeting to discuss the Housing of the 
 Working Classes. He has danced all the 
 way to, he will dance all the way from his 
 
286 HERE ARE LADIES 
 
 objective, but the spectacle of many men 
 dancing is provocative of pain, — To them 
 dancing is a duty, and a melancholy one. 
 If one danced to celebrate a toothache one 
 might take lessons from them. They stand 
 in the happy circle, their features are com- 
 posed to an iron gravity, their hands are as 
 rigid as those of a graven image, and then, 
 the fatal moment having arrived, they agi- 
 tate their legs with a cold fury which is dis- 
 tinctly unpleasant. Having finished they 
 dash their partners from their sides and re- 
 tire to blush and curse in a corner. 
 
 "When a man dances he should laugh and 
 crow and snap his fingers and make faces; 
 otherwise, he is not dancing at all, he is tak- 
 ing exercise. No person should be allowed 
 to dance without first swearing that he feels 
 only six years of age. People who admit 
 to feeling more than ten years old should 
 be sent to hospital, and any one proved guilty 
 of fourteen years of age should be lodged 
 in gaol without the option. 
 . "It is peculiar how often opposite emotions 
 may meet on a common plane of expression. 
 The extremes of love and hate strive to get 
 equally close to kiss or to bite the object of 
 their regard. Work and play may be equally 
 
TAVERN IN THE TOWN 287 
 
 strenuous and equally enthralling. Hunger 
 and satiety unite in a common boredom. A 
 happy person will dance from sheer delight, 
 and the man in whom a pin has been secreted 
 can only by dancing express the exquisite 
 sensibility of his cuticle. Whatever one does 
 or refrains from doing one must be tired by 
 bed-time — it is a law — but one may be pleas- 
 antly tired. 
 
 "I will suspect the morals of a man who 
 cannot dance. I will look curiously into 
 his sugar or statecraft. I will impeach his 
 candour or reticence, and sneer at his method 
 of lighting a fire unless he can frolic when 
 he goes out for a walk with a dog — that is 
 the beginning of dancing: the end of it is 
 the beginning of a world. A young dog is 
 a piece of early morning disguised in an 
 earthly fell, and the man who can resist his 
 contagion is a sour, dour, miserable mistake, 
 without bravery, without virtue, without 
 music, with a cranky body and a shrivelled 
 soul, and with eyes incapable of seeing the 
 sunlight. 
 
 "I have often thought that dogs are a very 
 superior race of people. They are certainly 
 more highly organised on the aflfectional 
 plane than man. A dog will love you just 
 
288 HERE ARE LADIES 
 
 for the fun of it — and that is virtue. Pat a 
 dog on the head and he will dance around 
 you in an ecstasy of good-fellowship. Let 
 us, at least, be the equal of these sagacities. 
 Let us put away our false intellectual pride. 
 Let us learn to be unconscious. The aver- 
 age man trembles into a dance imagining 
 that all eyes are rayed upon him wonderingly 
 or admiringly, whereas, in truth, he will 
 only be looked at if he dances very well or 
 very badly. Both of these extremities of 
 perfection ought to be avoided. We should 
 exercise our very bad or very good qualities 
 in solitude lest average people be saddened 
 by their disabilities in either direction. Let 
 your curses be as private as your prayers 
 for both are purgative operations. In public 
 we must conform to the standard, in private 
 only may we do our best or our worst. Act- 
 ing so, we will be freed from false pride 
 and cowardly self-consciousness. Let us be 
 brave. Let us caress the waists of our 
 neighbours without fear. Let everybody's 
 chin be our toy. Let us pat one another on 
 the hats as we pass in the melancholy streets. 
 — Thus only shall we learn to be gay and 
 careless who for so long have been miserable 
 and suspicious. We will be fearless and 
 
TAVERN IN THE TOWN 289 
 
 companionable who have been so timid and 
 solitary. A new, a better, a real police force 
 will arrest people who don't dance as they 
 travel to and from their labour. The world 
 will be happy at last, and civilisation will 
 begin to be possible." 
 
 Here, in an ecstasy of good-fellowship, 
 the old gentleman seized his pewter with his 
 left hand and my glass with his right hand, 
 and he emptied them both before recognis- 
 ing his mistake. I had, however, run out of 
 tobacco, whereupon he became very angry, 
 and refused to bid me good-night. 
 
Ill 
 
 Ths old gentleman condescended to accept 
 the last cigar which I had, and, having lit it 
 with my only match, he earnestly advised 
 me never to smoke to excess, because this 
 indulgence brought spots before the eyes, de- 
 teriorated the moral character, and was, 
 moreover, exceedingly expensive. — On the 
 subject of smoking and tobacco he spoke as 
 follows — 
 
 "I have observed that people who do not 
 smoke are usually of a sour and unsociable 
 disposition. All red-haired people smoke 
 naturally, and they almost invariably use 
 cut-plug. Very dark-haired men smoke 
 twist, and their natural strength and virtue 
 is such that in the intervals of smoking they 
 also chew tobacco. Fair-haired men gener- 
 ally smoke cigarettes — they do this, not for 
 the purpose of enjoyment, but purely in imi- 
 tation of their betters. However, in later 
 life, when they become bald, as they invari- 
 290 
 
TAVERN IN THE TOWN 291 
 
 ably do, they also became regenerate and 
 smoke pig-tail. Men with mouse-coloured 
 hair do not smoke at all. They collect post- 
 age stamps and sea-shells, and are usually 
 to be found sitting round a fire with other 
 girls eating chocolates and seeking for re- 
 plies to such questions as, when is a door not 
 a door? and why does a chicken cross the 
 road? They are miserable creatures whom 
 I will not further mention. 
 
 "The usage of tobacco, or some smokable 
 substitute, is as old as primitive man. Al- 
 most all nations of the earth are adepts in 
 this particular habit. It is, of course, an ac- 
 quired taste, as also are washing and to- 
 matoes. We are born with appetites which 
 are static and unchangeable, but we are also 
 born with a yearning for pleasure which is 
 almost as positive as an appetite and only 
 needs cultivation to become equally impera- 
 tive. Doubtless, a traveller from some dis- 
 tant planet, who knew nothing of tobacco, 
 would be astonished at the spectacle of a 
 man exhaling smoke from his lips with splen- 
 did unconcern, and our traveller's conjec- 
 tures as to the origin of the smoke and the 
 immunity of the smoker would be highly 
 amusing and instructive. 
 
292 HERE ARE LADIES 
 
 "I am often surprised on reflecting that 
 our immediate ancestors were debarred from 
 this pleasant indulgence, and I have won- 
 dered how they made the evenings pass. 
 The lack of tobacco and pockets in their 
 clothes (both of which are great civilising 
 agents) may have been responsible for the 
 wars, harryings, kidnappings and cattle 
 raids which, alternating with rigorous and 
 austere religious ceremonial, formed the 
 bulk of their pleasures. Nowadays we 
 leave these violent entertainments to chil- 
 dren and the semi-literate and take our plea- 
 sures more composedly. A man who can put 
 his hands in his pockets will seldom remove 
 them for the purpose of slaying some one 
 whose only fault is that he was born in the 
 County Sligo. A man with a pipe in his 
 teeth will be too much at peace with society 
 to endanger its existence. 
 
 "If the blessings of tobacco should be ex- 
 tended to the remainder of the vertebrates 
 (as, why should it not?) I am sure that 
 lions, elephants, and wild boars would avail 
 themselves of it. So, also, would kanga- 
 roos, a beautiful and agile race living in 
 Polynesia, or thereabouts — they are beauti- 
 ful hoppers, and collect large quantities of 
 
TAVERN IN THE TOWN 293 
 
 this plant. In this direction they are espe- 
 cially well equipped, each having a pouch 
 in her stomach in which to carry tobacco and 
 hops, but wherein they now ignorantly se- 
 crete their young. Serpents would smoke 
 a pipe with considerable elegance, and might 
 become more benevolent in consequence. 
 Frogs would smoke, but I fancy they would 
 expectorate too elaborately to be neigh- 
 bourly. Fish, however, would not smoke at 
 all. — They are a cowardly and corrupt peo- 
 ple, living in water, which is a singular 
 thing to do. Neither would many birds 
 smoke, they have neither the stamina nor the 
 teeth, but I am certain that crows and jack- 
 daws would chew tobacco eagerly and with 
 true relish. A large proportion of the in- 
 secta are too light-minded and frivolous to 
 care for smoking. Beetles, however, a very 
 reserved and dignified race, would smoke 
 cigars, and so would cockroaches, a rather 
 saturnine and cynical people; but no others. 
 "As for women — I am astonished they 
 have not smoked, by mere contagion, long 
 ago. If they did they would certainly grow 
 more kind-hearted and manly, and I am 
 sure that a deputation of ladies with pipes 
 in their mouths and hands in their pockets 
 
294 HERE ARE LADIES 
 
 would only have to demand the franchise 
 from an astounded ministry to obtain it. 
 
 "Members of Parliament are, I believe, 
 either a separate creation or a composite of 
 the parrot and the magpie. I have not yet 
 discovered their particular function in nature 
 but have observed them with some particu- 
 larity. They wear top hats and are con- 
 stantly making speeches, both of which are 
 easy things to do and quite pleasant minor 
 accomplishments. — So far as I can gather 
 their chief use has been to pass something 
 called a Budget. From the fact that this 
 Budget contains a disgraceful imposition on 
 tobacco I must take it that Members of 
 Parliament are among the lower animals 
 who do not smoke — they are also uninterest- 
 ing in other ways." 
 
 Having said this my old friend bowed to 
 me and departed genially with my cigar case 
 in his pocket. The shirt-sleeved Adonis be- 
 hind the counter wagged his head solemnly 
 at a fly and then clouted it with a dish- 
 cloth. 
 
iv; 
 
 Th^ old gentleman took an athletic pull at 
 his liquor, and continued his discourse. He 
 had been discussing more to himself than to 
 me the merits of Professor James and Mon- 
 sieur Bergson, and had inquired was I aware 
 of the nature of the Pragmatic Sanction. 
 The gentleman behind the counter remarked, 
 that he had one on his bicycle, but that they 
 were no good. This statement was de- 
 nounced by the Philosopher as an unnatural 
 and clumsy falsehood, and, anathematising 
 the ignorance of his interrupter, he came by 
 slow degrees to the following discourse — 
 
 "I have but littlle faith in any of the 
 methods of education with which I am pres- 
 ently acquainted. The objective of every 
 system of teaching should be to enable the 
 person who is being subjected to this repul- 
 sive treatment to do something which will 
 fit him to maintain a place in life where he 
 will be as little Jiable as possible to the 
 295 
 
296 HERE ARE LADIES 
 
 changes and vicissitudes of civilised exist- 
 ence. 
 
 "The cumbrous and inadequate prepara- 
 tion which is now in vogue can scarcely be 
 spoken of by a person of understanding with- 
 out the use of language unbefitting one who 
 is a member of (inter alia) the Reformed 
 Church and the highest order of the verte- 
 brates. 
 
 "If one walks into any school in this king- 
 dom one is certain to meet a tall, thin, an- 
 aemic youth with a draggled moustache and 
 a worried eye who is endeavouring to coerce 
 a mass of indigestible, inelastic and unim- 
 portant facts into the heads of divers sleepy 
 and disgusted children. If a small boy, on 
 being asked where lyabrador is, replies that 
 it is the most northerly point of the Berlin 
 Archipelago, he may be wrong in quite a 
 variety of ways, but even if he answered cor- 
 rectly he would still know just as little about 
 the matter, while if he were to give the only 
 proper reply to so ridiculous a conundrum, 
 he would tell his tormentor that he did not 
 care a rap where it was, that he had not put 
 it there, and that he would tell his mother if 
 the man did not leave him alone. What has 
 he got to do with Labrador, Terra del Fuego, 
 
TAVERN IN THE TOWN 297 
 
 or the Isles of Greece? Give him a fistful 
 of facts about Donnybrook, and send him 
 away to hunt out the truth of it, with a sand- 
 wich in his pocket and the promise of a lump 
 of toffee when he came back with his cargo 
 of truths — that would interest him, the tof- 
 fee would make the information stick, while 
 the verification of his facts would make his 
 head fat and fertile. 
 
 "When we ceased to be natural creatures 
 and put on the oppressive shrouds, wraps 
 and disguises which we label in the villainous 
 aggregate civilisation, we ceased to know 
 either how to teach or how to learn. We 
 exchanged the freedom and spaciousness of 
 life for a cramped existence compounded of 
 spectacles and bad grammar, this compli- 
 cated still further by the multiplication 
 tables, the dead languages and indigestion 
 tabloids. During his school-days many a 
 healthy boy had to parse ten square miles 
 of dead language. Why? he does not know 
 and he will never be told, for no one else 
 knows any more than he. The only thing 
 of which he is certain is, that he did not do 
 anything to deserve it. 
 
 "Civilisation, which is responsible for all 
 the woes of life, such as washing, shaving 
 
298 HERE ARE LADIES 
 
 and buying boots, is responsible for this also. 
 Potatoes are more productive than Latin 
 roots, are twice as nourishing and cannot be 
 parsed. Teach a girl how to recognise an 
 egg by the naked eye, and then teach her 
 how to cook it. Teach a boy how to discover 
 the kind of trees eggs grow on and what 
 is the best kind of soil to plant them in. 
 Teach a girl how to keep her hands from 
 scratching, her tongue from telling lies, and 
 her teeth from dropping out prematurely, 
 and she will, maybe, turn out a healthy kind 
 of mammal having a house filled with bright- 
 ness and laughter. Teach a boy how to pre- 
 vent another boy from mashing the head off 
 him, teach him how to be good to his mother 
 when she is old, teach him how to give two- 
 pence to a beggar without imagining that he 
 is investing his savings in Paradise at fifty 
 per cent and a bonus ; and then, having elim- 
 inated civilisation, education, clothes, tin 
 whistles and soap this earth will not be such 
 a bad old ball-alley for a man to smoke a 
 pipe in. 
 
 "Everything is wrong. People should rise 
 to their feet and salute when a farmer or 
 a teacher comes into a room. No man should 
 be allowed into Parliament who has not en- 
 
TAVERN IN THE TOWN 299 
 
 gaged in one or other of these professions, 
 but because they are the two most important 
 professions in tihe world their exponents are 
 robbed and harried into slaves and fools." 
 
 Having said this with great earnestness 
 the old gentleman absent-mindedly im- 
 pounded my drink, absorbed it, and strode 
 away wrapped in thought. The gentleman- 
 in- waiting sympathetically asked me if I 
 would have another one, but on learning that 
 I had no more money he said good-night. 
 
The old gentleman was in a state of most 
 unusual content. It might have been because 
 the sun was shining, or it might have been 
 because he had just finished his third glass : 
 whatever it was, the smile upon his face was 
 of a depth and a radiance impossible to de- 
 scribe. He spoke for a while upon the pleas- 
 ant smell of hay passing through a city, and, 
 remarking upon the enviable thirst of hay- 
 makers, he swept gradually to the following 
 weighty monologue — 
 
 "From the earliest times," said he, "drink- 
 ing has been regarded not alone as a neces- 
 sary lubricant, but also as a pastime, and 
 the ingenuity of every race under the sun 
 has been exercised in the attempt to give 
 variety and distinction to its beverages. 
 
 "We may take it that the earliest race of 
 
 men drank nothing but water, and hot water 
 
 to boot, for at that era the earth must have 
 
 been, if not hot, at least tepid. One can 
 
 300 
 
TAVERN IN THE TOWN 301 
 
 easily imagine that the contemporaries of 
 the five-toed horse might have welcomed 
 death as a happy release from their too sul- 
 try existence. 
 
 "I suppose man is the only brewing ani- 
 mal known to scientific research. All other 
 creatures take their food and drink neat, 
 or in a raw state. Of course, almost all 
 mammals are enabled by a highly ingenious 
 internal mechanism to brew milk, or some 
 other lacteal substitute, but this is per- 
 formed by a natural, instinctive impulse 
 towards the preservation of their young and 
 conserves none of the spirit of artifice and 
 calculation so necessary to authentic brew- 
 ing operations. 
 
 "Brewing was possible only when the sta- 
 bility of the human race was, more or less, 
 assured and permanent. Our primal ances- 
 tors existed in a state as nearly resembling 
 chaos as well might be. They had not yet 
 aggregated into communities, but vast 
 hordes of families — a father, an uncertain 
 number of mothers, and an astounding com- 
 plexity of children — wandered wherever 
 food seemed most abundant, and fought with 
 or eluded such other families as they chanced 
 upon. This state of existence was too pre- 
 
302 HERE ARE LADIES 
 
 carious and haphazard to allow of the nice- 
 ties of brewing being evolved. 
 
 "But the natural tendency of families to 
 lengthen, the gregarious instincts of the race, 
 and the need of mutual protection and assist- 
 ance ultimately welded these indiscriminate 
 families into communities of ever- varying 
 extent, and the movement of these huge 
 troops and transportation of their baggage 
 becoming more and more difficult (vehicles 
 being unknown and horses, perhaps, treble- 
 toed, wily and ferocious) and food, which 
 until then had only been obtained in a fugi- 
 tive state, becoming less easy of access, these 
 communities were forced to select a settled 
 habitation, scratch the earth for provender, 
 settled down to the breeding of one-toed 
 horses, and exercise the respectable virtues 
 of thrift and industry for their preservation. 
 Thus, laws were formulated, tentative and 
 unsatisfactory at first, and ever tending, as 
 to this day, to become more complex and less 
 satisfactory. Villages took shape, straggled 
 into towns, widened into cities and coalesced 
 into kingdoms and empires : and so, the civil- 
 isation of which we are partakers crawled 
 laboriously into being, with the brewer some- 
 where in the centre, active, rubicund and dis- 
 
TAVERN IN THE TOWN 303 
 
 putatious, as he has continued to date, with 
 a seat on the County Council which he had 
 swindled some thirsty statesman out of, and 
 more property than he could deal with by 
 himself. 
 
 "It is a singular reflection that thirst has 
 very little to do with the consumption of 
 drink, nor is this appetite subject to the va- 
 garies of climate, for the inhabitants of the 
 coldest regions will, it is feared, drink on 
 equal terms with those dwelling in the sun- 
 burnt tropics. In almost all ceremonial ob- 
 servances drinking has had a special place, 
 and this diversion lends itself to an infinite 
 number of objects — we can from the same 
 bowl quaff health to our friends and con- 
 fusion to our enemies, doubtless with equal 
 results. Here alone men meet on equal 
 terms. There is no religion, nationality or 
 politics in liquor: let it be but sufficiently 
 wet and potent and it matters not if the brew 
 has been fermented in the tub of a Christian 
 or the vessel of a heathen Turk. 
 
 "I understand that this latter race are for- 
 bidden, by the form of heresy which they 
 call religion, to use liquors more potent than 
 sherbet. Some thinkers believe that this 
 deprivation is possibly the reason of their 
 
304 HERE ARE LADIES 
 
 being Turks. — They are Turks, not from 
 conviction, but from habit, spite, and the bile 
 engendered by a too rigid and bigoted ab- 
 stinence. In this beHef, however, I do not 
 concur, for I consider that a Turk is a Turk 
 naturally, and without any further con- 
 straint than those imposed by the laws of 
 geography and primogeniture. 
 
 "Meanwhile it is interesting to speculate 
 on the future of an abstinent nation whose 
 politics have the misfortune to be guided by 
 a Peerage instead of a Beerage, and whose 
 national destiny is irrationally divorced from 
 the interests of 'The Trade.' Any departure 
 from the established customs of humanity 
 must be criticised unsparingly, and, if nec- 
 essary, destructively. To overthrow the cus- 
 toms of antiquity must entail its own punish- 
 ment and that punishment may be an awe- 
 inspiring and chastening Success. There- 
 fore, this happy whisky-governed land of 
 ours should never forsake its liquor or it may 
 be forced by opportunity and work to become 
 great. The foundations of our civilisation 
 are steeped in beer — let no sacrilegious hand 
 seek to interfere with it, for, even if the 
 foundations were rotten, the interests of the 
 Trade must not be disturbed, the grave aod 
 
TAVERN IN THE TOWN 305 
 
 learned members of our Corporation might 
 be horribly reduced to working for their liv- 
 ing, and our unfortunate City might have 
 the extraordinary misfortune to scramble 
 out of debt in the absence of its statesmen." 
 
 The old gentleman, with a bright smile, 
 said that "he did not mind if he did," and he 
 "did" with such gusto that I had to call a 
 cab. 
 
VI 
 
 Th^ old gentleman came in hurriedly and 
 called for that to which he was accustomed. 
 He fumbled in one pocket after another, and 
 after going over all his pockets several times 
 he remarked to me "I have forgotten my 
 purse." His air was so friendly and confid- 
 ing that it more than repaid me for the small 
 sum which I had to advance. He sat down 
 close beside me, and, after touching on the 
 difficulty of being understood in a tavern, 
 he drew genially to these remarks — 
 
 "Language may be described as a medium 
 for recording one's sensations. It is gesture 
 translated into sound. It is noise with a 
 meaning. Music cannot at all compare with 
 it, for music is no more than the scientific 
 distribution of noise, and it does not impart 
 any meaning to the disintegrated and har- 
 ried tumults. Language may be divided into 
 several heads, which, again, may be subdi- 
 vided almost indefinitely. — The primary 
 306 
 
TAVERN IN THE TOWN 307 
 
 heads are, language, talk, and speech. 
 Speech is the particular form of noise which 
 is made by Members of Parliament. Lan- 
 guage is the symbols whereby one lady in a 
 back street makes audible her impressions 
 of the lady who lives on the same floor — it 
 is often extremely sinewy. Talk may be 
 described as the crime of people who make 
 one tired. 
 
 "It is my opinion that people talk too 
 much. I think the world would be a health- 
 ier and better place if it were more silent. 
 On every day that passes there is registered 
 over all the earth a vast amount of language 
 which, so far as I can see, has not the slight- 
 est bearing on anything anywhere. 
 
 "I have been told of a race living in Cen- 
 tral Africa, or elsewhere, who by an inherent 
 culture were enabled to dispense with 
 speech. They whistled, and by practice had 
 attained so copious and flexible a vocabulary 
 that they could whistle good-morning and 
 good-night, or how-do-you-do with equal fa- 
 cility and distinction. This, while it is a step 
 in the right direction, is not a sufficiently 
 long step. To live among these people might 
 appear very like living in a cageful of 
 canaries or parrots. Parrots are a very 
 
3o8 HERE ARE LADIES 
 
 superior race who usually travel with sailors. 
 They have a whistle which can be guided 
 or deflected into various by-ways. I once 
 knew a parrot who was employed by a sailor- 
 man to curse for him when his own speech 
 was suspended by liquor. He could also 
 whistle ballads and polkas, and had attained 
 an astonishing proficiency in these arts ; for, 
 by long practice, he could dovetail curses and 
 whistles in a most energetic and, indeed, as- 
 tonishing manner. It would often project 
 two whistles and a curse, sometimes two 
 curses and a whistle, while all the time keep- 
 ing faithfully to the tune of 'The Sailor's 
 Grave' or another. It was a highly culti- 
 vated and erudite person. As it advanced 
 in learning it took naturally to chewing to- 
 bacco, but, being a person of strongly ex- 
 perimental habits, it tried one day to curse 
 and whistle and chew tobacco at the one 
 moment, with the unfortunate result that a 
 piece of honeydew got jammed between a 
 whistle and a curse, and the poor thing per- 
 ished miserably of strangulation. 
 
 "It is indeed singular that while every 
 race of mankind is competent to speak, 
 none of the other races, such as cats, cows, 
 caterpillars, and crabs, have shown the 
 
TAVERN IN THE TOWN 309 
 
 slightest interest in the making of this or- 
 dered noise. This is the more strange when 
 we reflect that almost all animals are pro- 
 vided with a throat and a mouth which are 
 capable of making a noise certainly equal 
 in volume and intelligibility to the sounds 
 made by a German or a Spaniard. 
 
 "Long ago men lived in trees and had 
 elongated backbones which they were able 
 to twitch. There were no ghops, theatres, 
 or churches in those times, and, consequently, 
 no necessity for a specialized and meticulous 
 prosody. Man barked at his fellow-man 
 when he wanted something, and if his re- 
 quest was not understood he bit his fellow- 
 man and was quit of him. When they for- 
 sook the trees and became ground-walkers 
 they came into contact with a variety of 
 theretofore unknown objects, the necessity 
 for naming which so exercised their tongues 
 that gradually their bark took on a different 
 quality and became susceptible of more com- 
 plicated sounds. Then, with the dawning 
 of the Pastoral Age, food in a gregarious 
 community became a matter of more espe- 
 cial importance. When a man barked at his 
 wife for a cocoanut and she handed him a 
 baby or a bowl of soup or an evening paper 
 
3IO HERE ARE LADIES 
 
 it became necessary, in order to minimise 
 her alternatives, that he should elaborate 
 his bark to meet this and an hundred other 
 circumstances. I do not know at what period 
 of history man was able to call his wife 
 names with the certainty of reprisal. It was 
 possible quite early, because I have often 
 heard a dog bark in a dissatisfied and im- 
 portant manner at another dog and be per- 
 fectly comprehended, 
 
 "A difficulty would certainly arise as to 
 the selection of a word when forty or fifty 
 men might at the same time label any article 
 with as many different names, and, it is rea- 
 sonable to suppose, that they would be re- 
 luctant to adopt any other expression but 
 that of their own creation. In such a crux 
 the strongest man of the community would 
 be likely to clout the others to an admission 
 that his terminology was standard. 
 
 "Thus, by slow accretions, the various 
 languages crept into currency, and the youth 
 of innumerable schoolboys has been embit- 
 tered by having to learn to spell. 
 
 "Grasshoppers are a fine, sturdy race of 
 people. A great many of them live on the 
 Hill of Howth, where I have often spent 
 hours hearkening to their charming conver- 
 
TAVERN IN THE TOWN 311 
 
 sation. They do not speak with the same 
 machinery that we use — they convey their 
 ideas to each other by rubbing their hind- 
 legs together, whereupon noises are pro- 
 duced of exceeding variety and interest. As 
 a method of speech this is simply delightful, 
 and I wish we could be trained to converse 
 in so majestical a manner. Perhaps we shall 
 live to see the day when the journals will 
 chronicle that Mr. Redmond had rubbed his 
 legs together for three hours at the Treasury 
 Bench and was removed frothing at the feet, 
 but after a little rest he was enabled to re- 
 turn and make more noise than ever." 
 
 The old gentleman smiled very genially 
 and went out. The assistant suggested that 
 he had a terrible lot of old "guff," but I did 
 not agree with him. 
 
VII 
 
 Between impartial sips at his own and my 
 liquor the old gentleman perused the small 
 volume which he had taken from my pocket. 
 After he had read it he buttoned the book in 
 his own pouch and addressed me with great 
 kindness — 
 
 "In some respects," said he, "poets differ 
 materially from other animals. For in- 
 stance, they seldom marry, and when they 
 do it is only under extreme compulsion. — 
 This is the more singular when we remember 
 that poets are almost continually singing 
 about love. When they do marry they in- 
 stantly cease to make poetry and turn to 
 labour like the rest of the community. 
 
 "It has been finely said that the poet is 
 born and not made, but I fancy that this 
 might be postulated of the rest of creation. 
 
 "Many people believe that all poets, arise 
 from their beds in the middle of the night, 
 and that they walk ten miles until they come 
 
 312 
 
TAVERN IN THE TOWN 313 
 
 to a hillside, where they remain until the 
 dawn whistling to the little birds; but this, 
 while it is true in some instances, is not in- 
 variably true. A proper poet would not walk 
 ten miles for any one except a publisher. 
 
 "The art of writing poetry is very diffi- 
 cult at first, but it becomes easy by practice. 
 The best way for a beginner is to take a line 
 from another poem ; then he should construct 
 a line to fit it ; then, having won his start, he 
 should strike out the first line (which, of 
 course, does not belong to him) and go 
 ahead. When the poet has written three 
 verses of four lines each he should run out 
 and find a girl somewhere and read it to her. 
 Girls are always delighted when this is done. 
 They usually clasp their hands together as 
 though in pain, roll their eyes in an ecstasy, 
 and shout, 'How perfectly perfect!' Then 
 the poet will grip both her hands very tightly 
 and say he loves her but will not marry her, 
 and, in an agony of inspiration, he will tear 
 himself away and stand drinks to himself 
 until he is put out. This is, of course, only 
 one way of being a poet. If he perseveres 
 he will ultimately write lyrics for the music 
 halls and make a fortune. He will then wear 
 
314 HERE ARE LADIES 
 
 a fur coat that died of the mange, he will 
 support a. carnation in his buttonhole, wear 
 eighteen rings on his right hand and one 
 hundred and twenty-seven on his left. He 
 will also be entitled to wear two breast-pins 
 at once and yellow boots. He will live in 
 England when he is at home, and be very 
 friendly with duchesses. 
 
 "Poetry is the oldest of the arts. Indeed, 
 it may be called the parent of the arts. 
 Poetry, music, and dancing are the only 
 relics which have come down to us from 
 those ancient times which are termed im- 
 partially the Golden or the Arboreal Ages. 
 In ancient Ireland the part played by the poet 
 was very important. Not alone was he the 
 singer of songs, he was also the bestower 
 of fame and the keeper of genealogies, and> 
 therefore, he was treated with a dignity 
 which he has since refused to forget. When 
 a poet made a song in public, it was custom- 
 ary that the king and the nobility should 
 divest themselves of their jewels, gold 
 chains, and rings, and give this light plunder 
 to him. They also bestowed on him goblets 
 of gold and silver, herds of cattle, farms, 
 and maidservants. The poets are not at all 
 
TAVERN IN THE TOWN 315 
 
 happy in these constricted times, and will 
 proclaim their astonishment and repugnance 
 in the roundest language. 
 
 "A few days ago I was speaking in Graf- 
 ton Street to a poet of great eminence, and, 
 with tears in his voice, he told me that he 
 had never been offered as much as a bracelet 
 by any lady. Times have changed; but for 
 the person who still wishes to enter this de- 
 cayed profession there is still every oppor- 
 tunity, for poetry is only the art of cutting 
 sentences into equal lengths, and then get- 
 ting these sentences printed by a publisher. 
 It is in the latter part of this formula that 
 the real art consists. 
 
 "There are a great many poets in Ireland, 
 particularly in Dublin. In an evening's 
 walk one may meet at least a dozen of this 
 peculiar people. They may be known by 
 the fact that they wear large, soft hats, and 
 that the breast-pockets of their coats have a 
 more than noticeable bulge, due to their habit 
 of carrying therein the twenty-seven master- 
 pieces which they have just written. They 
 are very ethereal creatures, composed largely 
 of soul and thirst. Soul is a far-away, eerie 
 thing, generally produced by eating fish." 
 
3i6 HERE ARE LADIES 
 
 The old gentleman* borrowed the price of 
 a tram home ; but as he instantly stood him- 
 self a drink with it, I was forced to relend 
 him the money when we got outside. 
 
VIII 
 
 The old gentleman was in a very bad temper 
 when I arrived. He had a large glass of 
 porter in his hand — a pint, in fact — and he 
 was gazing on this liquid with no great 
 favour. I was a little surprised at his choice 
 of a drink, for I had never before known 
 him care for any other refreshment than 
 spirits ; but I did not like to make any refer- 
 ence to the change. Looking thus, with 
 great disgust, upon his pint, he began to talk 
 with some asperity about the English na- 
 tion. 
 
 "The ways of Providence," said he, "are 
 indeed inscrutable, else why should there be 
 such things in the world as lobsters, gutta- 
 percha, ballet-dancers, and Englishmen? 
 These four objects, and some others — ^not- 
 ably water, tram-cars, and warts — I can find 
 no necessity for in nature; but there must 
 be some reason for such, or else they could 
 not have arrived at the more or less mature 
 
 317 
 
3i8 HERE ARE LADIES 
 
 stage of development at which they are 
 found. 
 
 "If we apply the canons of the Pragmatic 
 philosophy to these objects we will arrive at 
 some conclusion which, although it may not 
 justify their existence, will give a hint as to 
 their expediency. The question to be put to 
 any doubtful fact in nature is this — 'What 
 is your use?' and the reality of the fact is 
 in ratio to the degree of usefulness inhering 
 in it. Thus treated, most of the objects to 
 which I have referred may be able to adduce 
 some excuse for their existence. A lobster 
 may aver that if he were not alive his ab- 
 sence would be a severe blow to the lobster- 
 pot industry, and would throw many respec- 
 table families on the already-overburdened 
 rates. Gutta-percha might plead that it has 
 aspired through many millions of ages to a 
 maturity which would enable it to rub out 
 lead-pencil marks. Ballet-dancers would 
 have a great deal to say for themselves, pos- 
 sibly on moral grounds; but I really see no 
 reason for Englishmen. 
 
 "I have said that an object is real in ratio 
 to its usefulness. If we examine an Eng- 
 lishman thus pragmatically we must dis- 
 cover that his usefulness is zero, and we are 
 
TAVERN IN THE TOWN 319 
 
 then forced to inquire why he exists at all, 
 for he does undoubtedly exist, as witness this 
 pint of porter which I hold in my hand, and 
 which I do hold in my hand solely on account 
 of the unexplainable existence of English- 
 men. 
 
 "I may say at once that I never indulge in 
 this particular form of refreshment, against 
 which I have nothing further to charge than 
 it does not agree with my system, but I am 
 no bigot in such matters, and can quite will- 
 ingly believe that lower natures and less cul- 
 tivated palates may take pleasure in secret- 
 ing this inordinately lengthy liquid. I can- 
 not avoid the belief that any liquid which 
 may be imbibed by the imperial pint is an 
 essentially gross drink, and one unfitted for 
 persons of a high culture. Nor can I find 
 in nature that any of the more specialised 
 organisms take their drink in such extrava- 
 gant quantities. Camels, who, I am in- 
 formed, are a very well-behaved and moral 
 race leading rigorous and chaste lives in a 
 desert, do drink deeply, but their excess is 
 more apparent than real, for Providence in 
 an aberration endowed these folk with more 
 stomachs than the average person possesses, 
 and the necessity for filling these additional 
 
320 HERE ARE LADIES 
 
 cisterns accounts for and justifies their lib- 
 eral use of moisture. Worms, on the other 
 hand, are a folk for whom I have very little 
 reverence and no affection. I am not aware 
 whether they are all stomach or all neck, 
 but from their corner-boy expression I am 
 inclined to fancy that worms would drink 
 pints if they could. Happily, this disgusting 
 exhibition is forbidden by the imperfect 
 state of their civilisation and the inelastic 
 quality of their environment. 
 
 "But this is beside the point. My griev- 
 ance is, that in my old age I am forced to 
 drink porter which disagrees with my liver, 
 and am compelled to abstain from spirits 
 which have a sustaining and medicinal effect 
 on that organ, and this deprivation is solely 
 due to the unnatural and inexplicable exist- 
 ence of Englishmen. It may be that nature 
 grew Englishmen for the sole purpose of in- 
 terfering with my organs, and so, by modi- 
 fying my teaching in accordance with my 
 diseased interior, nature may be striving to 
 evolve a new culture wherein bile will have a 
 rare ability. If this is so, then I am not at 
 all obliged to nature for singling me out as 
 the instrument of her changes ; if it is not so 
 
TAVERN IN THE TOWN 321 
 
 I can only confess my ignorance and wash 
 my hands of the matter. 
 
 "Mark you, it was only during my lifetime 
 that an exorbitant tax was placed on whisky. 
 Before my era the interference with this re- 
 freshment was of the most tentative and 
 apologetic description. 
 
 "I can remember, and I do remember with 
 dismay, the time when whisky was purchase- 
 able at two bronze pennies for the naggin, 
 but now one may discharge a ruinous impost 
 for the privilege of imbibing one poor fourth 
 of that happy measure. 
 
 "This has been brought about by the con- 
 tinuous interference of Englishmen with my 
 liquor. Time and again they have added ad- 
 ditional difficulties to my obtaining this me- 
 dicinal refreshment, and, while I am com- 
 pelled to bow my head to the ideas of nature 
 for the improvement of our race, I am often 
 inclined, having bowed it, to charge goat- 
 like at these intolerable people and butt them 
 off the face of the earth into the nowhere 
 for which their villainous and ungenial 
 habits have fitted them. Otherwise, by their 
 future exactions I may be brought to the 
 drinking of benzene or printer's ink for lack 
 
322 HERE ARE LADIES 
 
 of a fortune wherewith to purchase fitter 
 refreshment." 
 
 Having said this with great fury, the old 
 gentleman laid down his untasted pint and 
 stalked out. The acolyte behind the counter 
 made a sympathetic clicking noise with his 
 tongue and sold the pint to another man. — 
 He probably did this thoughtlessly, and I 
 did not care to embarrass him by remarking 
 on it 
 
IX 
 
 I MET the old gentleman marching solemnly 
 across Cork Hill. There was a tramcar in 
 his immediate rear, a cab in front of him, an 
 outside-car and a bicycle on his right hand, 
 and a dray laden with barrels on his left. 
 The drivers of all these vehicles were en- 
 treating him in one voice to stroll elsewhere. 
 He looked around and, observing that mat- 
 ters were complicated, he opened his um- 
 brella, held it over his head, and awaited 
 events with the most admirable fortitude. 
 When I had escorted him to the pavement, 
 and further to his own hostelry, he seized 
 the third button of my waistcoat and spake 
 as follows: — 
 
 "It is an admirable example of the wisdom 
 of nature that she has refrained in every case 
 from equipping her creatures with wheels 
 instead of legs, and she might easily have 
 done this. So far as I am aware there are 
 but four methods of progression in nature— 
 323 
 
324 HERE ARE LADIES 
 
 these are, flying, swimming, walking and 
 crawling. None of these are performed with 
 a rotary motion, and all are admirably 
 adapted to the people using them, and are 
 sufficiently expeditious to suit their needs. 
 
 "There is no doubt that the most primitive 
 of movements is that of crawling, and by 
 this method of progression, one is brought 
 into an intimate contact with the earth which 
 cannot fail to be beneficial. I do not see any 
 real difficulty in the way of our again becom- 
 ing a race of happy and crawling people. 
 The initial essay towards this end is to shed 
 our arms and legs as useless incumbrances, 
 and then to aim at a stronger growth of jaw 
 and cranium. Among certain organisms it 
 will be found that the jaws are the most im^ 
 mediately useful parts of the body, perform- 
 ing the most varied and delicate functions 
 with the greatest ease. A dog, for example, 
 will, with the one organ, play with a ball, 
 kill a cat, or nip the calf of a Christian, and, 
 when the moon is high, he can make a noise 
 with his mouth which is as loud and quite 
 as melodious as the professional clamour of 
 a ballad-vocalist. 
 
 "One of the greatest evils of civilisation is 
 the longing for speed, which, within the past 
 
TAVERN IN THE TOWN 325 
 
 hundred years, has developed from a simple 
 vice to a complicated mania. Long ago men 
 were accustomed to use their legs in order to 
 propel themselves forward, and, when 
 greater speed was necessary, they assisted 
 their legs with their hands^this was coeval 
 with, or shortly after, the arboreal age. 
 Next came the hunting epoch, when some 
 person, probably a commercial traveller, 
 dropped off a tree on to a horse's back, and 
 finding the movement pleasant he informed 
 his companions of his adventure and demon- 
 strated to them how it had been performed. 
 It is from this occurrence we may date the 
 degradation of the human race and the in- 
 dustry of horse-stealing. There followed 
 the pastoral age, when nuts were, more or 
 less, abandoned as a food and tillage became 
 general. The necessity for conveying the 
 crops from the field to the camp excited some 
 lazy individual to invent a cart, and, thus, 
 wheels came into use and the doom of hu- 
 manity as an instinctive and natural race 
 was sealed. 
 
 "While we walked on our own legs we 
 were natural and instinctive creatures, open 
 to every impression of nature and able to 
 tell the time without clocks, but when we 
 
326 HERE ARE LADIES 
 
 adopted mechanical methods of progression 
 we became unnatural and mechanical people, 
 whizzing restlessly and recklessly from here 
 to yonder, for no purpose save the mere 
 sensual pleasure of movement, and we are 
 at this date simply debauched by travel and 
 have shortened the world to less than one- 
 tenth of its actual size as well as destroying 
 our abilities for simple and rational enjoy- 
 ment. 
 
 "If we continue using these artificial 
 means of locomotion there is no doubt that 
 the race will become atrophied in the legs 
 but with extraordinary results. The spec- 
 tacle of an egg-shaped humanity squatting 
 painfully on engines is not a pleasant one to 
 contemplate, nor is the prospect of a world 
 wherein there will be neither, breeches nor 
 boots good for the moralist or economist to 
 dwell upon. 
 
 "In order to conserve the happiness of 
 the world every inventor should be squashed 
 in the egg, more particularly those having 
 anything to do with wheels, cogs or levers. 
 The wheel has no counterpart in nature, and 
 is unthinkable to any but a diseased and 
 curious mind. Man will never more be 
 happy until he has broken all the machinery 
 
TAVERN IN THE TOWN 327 
 
 he can find with a hammer, and has then 
 thrown the hammer into the sea; and then 
 he can, by experiment, become almost as 
 rooted in the earth as a tree or an artesian 
 well. It is a bad thing to have an indefinite 
 horizon. It is a good thing to grow knowing 
 one part of the world as thoroughly as one 
 knows the inside of one's boots. Legs make 
 for nationality, patriotism, and all the vir- 
 tues which centre in locality. Wheels make 
 for diffuseness, imperialisms, cosmopolitan- 
 isms. By the use of legs humanity has 
 stalked into manhood. By the use of wheels 
 we are rapidly rolling into a race of com- 
 mercial travellers, touts, gad-abouts, and 
 members of parliament, folk with the hang- 
 ing jaws of astonishment, avid for curios, 
 and with mental, moral and optical indiges- 
 tion. 
 
 "I believe that the Spanyols and Mandi- 
 baloes, two Mongol races inhabiting the 
 countries at the rear of the Great Chow 
 Desert, were the first people to deal largely 
 with wheels. The men of these nations were 
 used, when travelling, to affix two small 
 wheels upon their shoulder blades, and on 
 coming to any slight incline in their path 
 they would curl up their legs, lie on their 
 
328 HERE ARE LADIES 
 
 backs and free-wheel as distantly as the slant 
 of the ground permitted, greatly, no doubt, 
 to the astonishment of less sophisticated peo- 
 ple. But, knowing their habits, their ene- 
 mies were wont to lie in wait at the bottoms 
 of hills and slopes, and when a Spanyol or 
 Mandibaloe came wheeling down a hill with 
 his legs up he was killed before he could re- 
 gain a less complicated position, or one more 
 fitted for defence or ofifence. Thus, these 
 races became rapidly extinct, and are now 
 only remembered by the tracks as wide as 
 a man's shoulderblades which are occasion- 
 ally found in parts of the post-tertiary 
 formation." 
 
 The old gentleman released the third but- 
 ton of my waistcoat which he had held for 
 so long and stepped with me out of the hos- 
 tel. As it had beg^n to rain he carefully 
 folded up his umbrella, tucked it under his 
 arm, and strode rapidly down the street. 
 Some small boys followed him for a little 
 time singing, "We are the boys of Wexford' 
 who fought with heart and hand," but I 
 drove these away. 
 
He wiped his face with a large, red pocket- 
 handkerchief, pursed his Hps, shut one eye, 
 and, with the other, he critically observed the 
 remnant of his liquor. After a moment of 
 deep consideration he smiled delightfully and 
 said he thought it was all right. The apothe- 
 cary behind the counter smiled also as one 
 gratified and suggested that there was not 
 much of that at the North Pole, and, after a 
 little discussion on this point, the old gentle- 
 man addressed me in the following words : — 
 
 "I do not understand what necessity im- 
 pels people to the discovery of something, 
 which, if it has any existence at all, has only 
 an idealistic existence, and which, when it is 
 discovered, cannot be utilised in any possible 
 direction. Utility is the first attribute of all 
 terrestrial bodies. A stone, for instance, is 
 a useful inorganic substance — it can be built 
 into a house, or thrown at a duck, or, when 
 329 
 
330 HERE ARE LADIES 
 
 ground into sand, it can be, and is, sold as 
 sugar by a grocer. It is constantly being 
 utilised in one or other of these directions; 
 and so with all other objects. But the neces- 
 sity for a North or a South Pole has yet to 
 be demonstrated. 
 
 "The statement that the North Pole was 
 put there by the Castle authorities is one 
 which I do not believe, for I am assured that 
 at every period of the world's history there 
 has been a North and a South Pole, which, 
 surrounded as they were by snow-clad coun- 
 tries, icebergs, cold water and whales, were 
 too remote and inhospitable to tempt the 
 average civilian to journey there. 
 
 "The only thing which grows in the Polar 
 regions is ice, and this is generally found in 
 almost tropical profusion and rankness, 
 growing sometimes to the height of several 
 hundred feet, none of which wear boots. 
 Polar bears and Esquimos are also found 
 there, but in scattered and inconsiderable 
 quantities. These two races spend most of 
 their time chasing each other in order to 
 keep themselves warm, which they do by 
 degrees which are often registered on a 
 barometer. They also eat each other and 
 get scurvy. Outside of these relaxations 
 
TAVERN IN THE TOWN 331 
 
 their existence is stagnant and unexciting. 
 I sometimes fancy that if I had the misfor- 
 tune to be born a polar bear or an Esquimo I 
 would not have been a patriot. 
 
 "I have no esteem for ice in other than 
 easily portable quantities. Some small pieces 
 to pack around fish, a particle to drop into 
 a glass of lager beer — that is all the ice 
 which I can regard patiently or leniently; 
 but a continent composed entirely of ice and 
 polar bears tempts me to believe that Provi- 
 dence is subject to aberrations. 
 
 "It is supposed to redound to the credit of 
 a nation when one of its citizens resolves to 
 discover some inaccessible and futile place, 
 and proceeds to do so in the most fantastic 
 manner. The inhabitants of that country 
 who remain at their work and continue to 
 pay their rates are expected to be in a con- 
 dition of wild enthusiasm and delight at the 
 adventure. — My own impression is, that the 
 majority of people take no more than a tepid 
 interest in these forlorn adventures, and are 
 but imperfectly convinced of the sanity of 
 the adventurers ; and this is the more partic- 
 ularly noticeable when the quest is for some- 
 thing so intangible and unmarketable as a 
 North Pole. Why need they go so far afield 
 
332 HERE ARE LADIES 
 
 for their excitement? Every discoverer is 
 a detective. He traces missing places, and 
 there are cartloads of Poles in their own 
 countries waiting for explorers. 
 
 "The habit of seeking for a North Pole 
 is one of only comparative antiquity. Its 
 conception is well within the historic era, 
 and must, therefore, be classed as an ac- 
 quired habit and one not inherent in man. 
 I have not observed that any other animals 
 are addicted to this peculiar expeditionary 
 craze. It is true that many species of birds 
 migrate annually from these shores, and, al- 
 though their departures are usually chron- 
 icled in the newspapers, it must not without 
 further evidence be inferred that these birds 
 have gone to look for the North Pole. They 
 may, as a matter of fact, have left this coun- 
 try to avoid being arrested, for here one is 
 continually being arrested. The evidence in 
 favour of the North Pole theory as regards 
 birds is, that nobody knows where they have 
 gone to, and that as the rest of the earth 
 is round and densely populated their arrival 
 would be noted somewhere as their departure 
 was, but their arrival not being so noted, 
 and as they must be somewhere, the process 
 of eliminating all possible places leaves no- 
 
TAVERN IN THE TOWN 333 
 
 where but the North Pole as their objective. 
 Now birds are a very intelligent and strenu- 
 ous race of people who build nests in trees 
 and have often five eggs at a time, and I be- 
 lieve that they leave these countries because 
 their nests are full of broken egg-shells, and 
 because the winter is setting in, and because 
 they dislike cold weather ; and, thus disliking 
 cold weather, it is unlikely that they would 
 fly to the North Pole where the cold is very 
 intense, and where, moreover, there is little 
 food to be found, saving polar bears and Es- 
 quimos, a form of victual for which birds 
 have only the scantiest relish. My own im- 
 pression is, that these birds when out of 
 sight of land are enabled by a mechanism 
 with which we are not yet familiar, to con- 
 vert themselves into fishes, or, alternatively, 
 that they know the whereabouts of Tir na 
 n-Og and go there, or else that they do not 
 go anywhere at all but are simply translated 
 into the Fourth Dimension of Space, and 
 are, thus, flying, nesting and mating all 
 around us in a medium which our eyes are 
 too gross to penetrate. 
 
 "From a perusal of the evening papers I 
 observe that the discoverer of the North Pole 
 is an American citizen with a complicated 
 
334 HERE ARE LADIES 
 
 pedigree, a long beard and a red shirt, all of 
 which he hoisted to the top of the Pole and 
 left there for subsequent identification. I 
 fear this was a thoughtless action on his part 
 because the Esquimos who live habitually 
 at the North Pole, but have not discovered it, 
 will, while his back is turned, take to wearing 
 his shirt in turn. They are a communistic 
 people, I fancy, and no shirt will survive 
 communism. Also, seeing the fuss which is 
 being made of their Pole, they may either 
 hide it or sell pieces of it to tourists as re- 
 membrancers. 
 
 "The explorer should have cached his shirt 
 and other memorials at the foot of the Pole, 
 built a cairn upon it, and shook cayenne pep- 
 per on top of all to keep bears away — ^but 
 it is useless to advise explorers." 
 
 The ancient hereupon made a significant 
 gesture to the curate, who misinterpreted it, 
 and brought more than he had required. He 
 was very much perturbed, for, as he ex- 
 plained, he had forgotten to bring his purse 
 with him. He consented, however, to use 
 my purse for his needs, and, after paying his 
 shot, he, in an abstracted and melancholy 
 manner, put the change in his trouser pocket. 
 
TAVERN IN THE TOWN 335 
 
 There was only one shilling in the purse so 
 I did not like to draw his attention to the 
 mistake. He very genially returned my 
 purse, and said he had conceived a great lik- 
 ing for me. 
 
XI 
 
 Wh^n the old gentleman came in I noticed 
 at once that he was out of humour. He had 
 a large scar on his chin, and three pieces of 
 newspaper on his cheeks. He discharged 
 the contents of my tobacco pouch into a pipe 
 which had a holding capacity of one and a 
 half ounces, and then he became more cheer- 
 ful— 
 
 "I dislike extremely," said he, "the im- 
 pertinent interference with nature which 
 men are nowadays guilty of. Not content 
 with clamping our feet in leathern boxes, 
 our legs in cloth cylinders, our trunks in a 
 variety of wrappings of complex inutility, 
 and then inserting our heads into monstrous 
 felt pots, we even approach ourselves more 
 minutely and scrape the very hair from our 
 faces which nature has sown there for pur- 
 poses of ornament and protection; with the 
 result, that it is difficult for a short-sighted 
 person to distinguish rapidly the sex of the 
 336 
 
TAVERN IN THE TOWN 337 
 
 people with whom he comes in contact sav- 
 ing by a minute and tedious examination of 
 their clothing. 
 
 "This habit of shaving is one which is en- 
 tirely confined to man. It is the one par- 
 ticular habit that he holds apart from all 
 other animals, and, indeed, it is not an ac- 
 complishment upon which he need pride 
 himself, for in parting with his beard he has 
 sacrificed the only pleasant-looking portion 
 of his face. 
 
 "It could easily be proved that hair and 
 innocence have a subtle relationship. No 
 very hairy person is really vicious, as wit- 
 ness the caterpillar, of whom I have not 
 heard that he ever bit any one : while, on the 
 other hand, the frog, who is born bald, would 
 doubtless be very savage were it not for the 
 fact that nature has benevolently curtailed 
 his teeth. Fishes, also, an uncleanly race, 
 and who I fancy are shaved before birth, 
 are all monsters of cold-blooded ferocity, and 
 they will devour their parents and even their 
 own offspring with equal and indiscriminate 
 enjoyment. 
 
 "The habit of shaving is not of a very 
 ancient origin. When humanity lived a 
 quiet, rural and unambitious life, men did 
 
338 HERE ARE LADIES 
 
 not shave : their hair was their glory, and if 
 they had occasion to swear, which must have 
 been infrequent, their hardiest and readiest 
 oath was, 'by the beard of my father,' show- 
 ing clearly that this texture was held in ven- 
 eration in early times and was probably ac- 
 corded divine honours upon suitable occa- 
 sions. 
 
 "With the advent of war came the habit 
 of shaving. A beard offered too handy a 
 grip to a foeman who had gotten to close 
 quarters, therefore, warriors who had no 
 true hardihood of soul preferred cutting off 
 their beards to the honourable labour of de- 
 fending their chins. Many ancient races ef- 
 fected a compromise in order to retain a 
 fitting military appearance, for a bare-faced 
 warrior has but little of terror in his aspect. 
 The ancient Egyptians, for example, who 
 had cut off, or could not cultivate, or had 
 been forcibly deprived of their beards, were 
 wont to go into battle clad in heavy false 
 whiskers, which, when an enemy seized hold 
 of them, came off instantly in his hand, and 
 the ancient Egyptian was enabled to de- 
 spatch him while in a trance of stupefaction 
 and horror. Clean-shaved men became, by 
 this cowardly stratagem, very much prized 
 
TAVERN IN THE TOWN 339 
 
 as fighting men, and thus the foundation of 
 the shaving habit was laid. 
 
 "It is a remarkable fact that, save for an 
 inconsiderable number who live in circuses, 
 women have no beards. I am unable at pres- 
 ent to trace the reason for this singular omis- 
 sion, but the advantages of beards for 
 women are too patent for explanation. They 
 would improve her personal appearance, and 
 their advantages as air-purifiers or respira- 
 tors I need not dwell upon. I am certain 
 that a persistent application of goose-grease 
 and electricity to the chin of a woman would 
 at last enable her to become as bearded and 
 virtuous as her husband, besides entitling 
 her to the political franchise. They are per- 
 verse creatures, however, and it is possible 
 that this deprivation is responsible for many 
 of their ill-humours and crankinesses. Their 
 scarcity of beard is the more remarkable 
 when we observe that the female cat is as 
 magnificently whiskered as her male com- 
 panion. The wisdom of cats is proverbial, 
 and I have never heard of a cat who has 
 hired another cat to bite out, tear off, scrape 
 or otherwise demolish his or her whiskers. 
 When I do hear of some such occurrence I 
 
340 HERE ARE LADIES 
 
 shall be prepared to reconsider my position 
 on this subject. 
 
 "In some ways a clean-shaved face is de- 
 sirable. A pig's cheek should not have 
 whiskers, neither should oysters nor the face 
 of a clock, but a man's face should never be 
 seen out of doors without a decent and hon- 
 ourable covering." 
 
 Having said this, the old gentleman, with 
 remarkable presence of mind, drank my 
 whisky, and then apologised with dignified 
 and touching humility. As we departed the 
 youth behind the counter corrugated his fea- 
 tures in a remarkable manner, and said, 
 "bow-wow" by way of valediction. 
 
XII 
 
 H^ helped himself absently to two water 
 biscuits and a piece of cheese and sank to a 
 profound reverie. The eating of this light 
 refreshment was probably a manifestation 
 of subconscious thought, for, when he had 
 finished, he spoke to me as follows — 
 
 "There are a great many things which I 
 dislike immensely but the necessity for which 
 I must perforce acquiesce in: these are 
 water, easterly winds and actresses: but 
 there are other habits cultivated by humanity 
 for which I can find no apology, and some 
 of these have grown to so great an extent 
 that they now bulk as evils of terrific mag- 
 nitude." 
 
 "Foremost among these reprehensible cus- 
 toms I will mention that of eating. Of all 
 the evils under which civilisation staggers 
 helplessly the most ponderous and merciless 
 is hunger, and it is the evil which will ulti- 
 mately decimate all existing forms of life. 
 341 
 
342 HERE ARE LADIES 
 
 "All forms of organic life have now for 
 millions of years been slaves to this filthy 
 habit of eating, and have superimposed upon 
 their original singleness of form a variety 
 of weighty and unattractive organs to keep 
 pace with the satisfaction of this oppressive 
 appetite, until to-day the entire organic 
 world stands upon the imminent brink of de- 
 struction if food should be withheld from it 
 for one entire week. 
 
 "Every living being should be self-sup- 
 porting and self-sufficient. It should be in- 
 herent in the economy of a man to produce 
 for himself not alone food but also shelter 
 and raiment from his own internal re- 
 sources. A man should be able to build a 
 house or evolve a loaf of bread out of his 
 own body with ease and assurance. 
 
 "Look for a moment at spiders. Every 
 spider carries within himself the materials 
 for his own home. His stomach, instead of 
 being, as is vulgarly supposed, a cemetery 
 for smaller organisms, is in reality his brick- 
 field and rope-walk, and out of this minute 
 sack he will produce endless miles of cordage 
 and web which he weaves into the most beau- 
 tiful and mathematical harmonies. This is 
 a self-contained utility which might be imi- 
 
TAVERN IN THE TOWN 343 
 
 tated by men with advantage, and that which 
 is done with ease by a spider can scarcely 
 oflfer insuperable difficulty to the chief of the 
 vertebrates. Of course, each man's produc- 
 tion will be more or less guided and limited 
 by his capacity. — Thus, fat men will spin 
 forth cathedrals, opera-houses and railway 
 stations. Thin men will devote themselves 
 to obelisks, church spires, factory chimneys, 
 and artistic bric-a-brac. Short men will 
 willingly produce artisans' dwellings, busts 
 of famous men and, perhaps, now and then, 
 pyramids or villa residences. Constant 
 work of this description will not alone render 
 us independent of landlords, but, by atrophy 
 of the digestive organs, will inaugurate a 
 brighter era for long-suffering, food-fed 
 humanity. 
 
 "Suppose it is advanced that man cannot 
 keep up his strength and usefulness without 
 some kind of exterior nourishment — I will 
 then proceed to demonstrate how this can be 
 most easily accomplished. Our first cousins, 
 the trees and bushes, do not sit down at 
 stated hours to a heterogeneous mess of 
 steak, tea and onions : they stand firm in the 
 ground unhurried by the sound of the din- 
 ner-bell and careless of the state of the 
 
344 HERE ARE LADIES 
 
 American market. As the spider is sufficient 
 in itself in house-building, so are the trees, 
 the grass and all inorganic life self-support- 
 ing so far as food is concerned. The reason 
 is, that trees, grass and flowers are bedded in 
 the earth, the source of all nourishment. Let 
 this fact be but properly understood, and the 
 last and greatest bar to human progress will 
 be removed, and 'the millenniums which so 
 furiously chase us' will have a chance of 
 catching us up. 
 
 "If, once a week, men would bury them- 
 selves to the chin in good fertile clay, and 
 allow the nurture of the earth to permeate 
 their bodies there would be an end to this 
 gross and unfortunate digestive activity. I 
 have myself experimented in this direction 
 with the most encouraging results. A rich, 
 loamy soil is very good — it is rather cold at 
 the bottom, but invigorating. Light, sandy 
 clay would suit sedentary persons such as 
 parsons, artists, judges. In poor ground 
 some superphosphates, or a light compost 
 could be strewn by each person around him- 
 self. Families would take turns in pruning 
 each other, and so forth; but all these inci- 
 dental matters would rapidly adjust them- 
 selves. After a time we might succeed in 
 
TAVERN IN THE TOWN 345 
 
 propagating ourselves by seeds or slips, and 
 this would lead to a radical- readjustment of 
 our sex relations and put an end to many 
 of the problems wherewith we are eternally 
 badgered and perplexed. 
 
 "In some ways I will admit that food is 
 valuable. As a means of killing a rich uncle 
 by gout, or of attaining wealth by judicious 
 adulteration it can be recommended, and 
 looked at in the light of a gentle morning 
 exercise to be taken immediately after rising 
 it is useful, but as a method of obtaining 
 nourishment it is obsolete and disgustingly 
 vulgar." 
 
 At this point the gentleman-in-waiting 
 snorted in a most unbecoming manner, and 
 dived under the counter, from beneath which 
 he alternately mewed like a cat and crowed 
 like a cock. It was a clear attack of hys- 
 teria. While the poor man was recovering 
 from his seizure tiie old gentleman absent- 
 mindedly departed without paying his shot. 
 
 THE End 
 
 Printed in the United States of Amerioa.