Dubliners
position on his knee and presented an attentive face to the preacher.
The preacher turned back each wide sleeve of his surplice with an
elaborate large gesture and slowly surveyed the array of faces. Then he
said:
_“For the children of this world are wiser in their generation than the
children of light. Wherefore make unto yourselves friends out of the
mammon of iniquity so that when you die they may receive you into
everlasting dwellings.”_
Father Purdon developed the text with resonant assurance. It was one of
the most difficult texts in all the Scriptures, he said, to interpret
properly. It was a text which might seem to the casual observer at
variance with the lofty morality elsewhere preached by Jesus Christ.
But, he told his hearers, the text had seemed to him specially adapted
for the guidance of those whose lot it was to lead the life of the
world and who yet wished to lead that life not in the manner of
worldlings. It was a text for business men and professional men. Jesus
Christ, with His divine understanding of every cranny of our human
nature, understood that all men were not called to the religious life,
that by far the vast majority were forced to live in the world and, to
a certain extent, for the world: and in this sentence He designed to
give them a word of counsel, setting before them as exemplars in the
religious life those very worshippers of Mammon who were of all men the
least solicitous in matters religious.
He told his hearers that he was there that evening for no terrifying,
no extravagant purpose; but as a man of the world speaking to his
fellow-men. He came to speak to business men and he would speak to them
in a businesslike way. If he might use the metaphor, he said, he was
their spiritual accountant; and he wished each and every one of his
hearers to open his books, the books of his spiritual life, and see if
they tallied accurately with conscience.
Jesus Christ was not a hard taskmaster. He understood our little
failings, understood the weakness of our poor fallen nature, understood
the temptations of this life. We might have had, we all had from time
to time, our temptations: we might have, we all had, our failings. But
one thing only, he said, he would ask of his hearers. And that was: to
be straight and manly with God. If their accounts tallied in every
point to say:
“Well, I have verified my accounts. I find all well.”
But if, as might happen, there were some discrepancies, to admit the
truth, to be frank and say like a man:
“Well, I have looked into my accounts. I find this wrong and this
wrong. But, with God’s grace, I will rectify this and this. I will set
right my accounts.”
THE DEAD
Lily, the caretaker’s daughter, was literally run off her feet. Hardly
had she brought one gentleman into the little pantry behind the office
on the ground floor and helped him off with his overcoat than the
wheezy hall-door bell clanged again and she had to scamper along the
bare hallway to let in another guest. It was well for her she had not
to attend to the ladies also. But Miss Kate and Miss Julia had thought
of that and had converted the bathroom upstairs into a ladies’
dressing-room. Miss Kate and Miss Julia were there, gossiping and
laughing and fussing, walking after each other to the head of the
stairs, peering down over the banisters and calling down to Lily to ask
her who had come.
It was always a great affair, the Misses Morkan’s annual dance.
Everybody who knew them came to it, members of the family, old friends
of the family, the members of Julia’s choir, any of Kate’s pupils that
were grown up enough, and even some of Mary Jane’s pupils too. Never
once had it fallen flat. For years and years it had gone off in
splendid style as long as anyone could remember; ever since Kate and
Julia, after the death of their brother Pat, had left the house in
Stoney Batter and taken Mary Jane, their only niece, to live with them
in the dark gaunt house on Usher’s Island, the upper part of which they
had rented from Mr Fulham, the corn-factor on the ground floor. That
was a good thirty years ago if it was a day. Mary Jane, who was then a
little girl in short clothes, was now the main prop of the household,
for she had the organ in Haddington Road. She had been through the
Academy and gave a pupils’ concert every year in the upper room of the
Antient Concert Rooms. Many of her pupils belonged to the better-class
families on the Kingstown and Dalkey line. Old as they were, her aunts
also did their share. Julia, though she was quite grey, was still the
leading soprano in Adam and Eve’s, and Kate, being too feeble to go
about much, gave music lessons to beginners on the old square piano in
the back room. Lily, the caretaker’s daughter, did housemaid’s work for
them. Though their life was modest they believed in eating well; the
best of everything: diamond-bone sirloins, three-shilling tea and the
best bottled stout. But Lily seldom made a mistake in the orders so
that she got on well with her three mistresses. They were fussy, that
was all. But the only thing they would not stand was back answers.
Of course they had good reason to be fussy on such a night. And then it
was long after ten o’clock and yet there was no sign of Gabriel and his
wife. Besides they were dreadfully afraid that Freddy Malins might turn
up screwed. They would not wish for worlds that any of Mary Jane’s
pupils should see him under the influence; and when he was like that it
was sometimes very hard to manage him. Freddy Malins always came late
but they wondered what could be keeping Gabriel: and that was what
brought them every two minutes to the banisters to ask Lily had Gabriel
or Freddy come.
“O, Mr Conroy,” said Lily to Gabriel when she opened the door for him,
“Miss Kate and Miss Julia thought you were never coming. Good-night,
Mrs Conroy.”
“I’ll engage they did,” said Gabriel, “but they forget that my wife
here takes three mortal hours to dress herself.”
He stood on the mat, scraping the snow from his goloshes, while Lily
led his wife to the foot of the stairs and called out:
“Miss Kate, here’s Mrs Conroy.”
Kate and Julia came toddling down the dark stairs at once. Both of them
kissed Gabriel’s wife, said she must be perished alive and asked was
Gabriel with her.
“Here I am as right as the mail, Aunt Kate! Go on up. I’ll follow,”
called out Gabriel from the dark.
He continued scraping his feet vigorously while the three women went
upstairs, laughing, to the ladies’ dressing-room. A light fringe of
snow lay like a cape on the shoulders of his overcoat and like toecaps
on the toes of his goloshes; and, as the buttons of his overcoat
slipped with a squeaking noise through the snow-stiffened frieze, a
cold, fragrant air from out-of-doors escaped from crevices and folds.
“Is it snowing again, Mr Conroy?” asked Lily.
She had preceded him into the pantry to help him off with his overcoat.
Gabriel smiled at the three syllables she had given his surname and
glanced at her. She was a slim, growing girl, pale in complexion and
with hay-coloured hair. The gas in the pantry made her look still
paler. Gabriel had known her when she was a child and used to sit on
the lowest step nursing a rag doll.
“Yes, Lily,” he answered, “and I think we’re in for a night of it.”
He looked up at the pantry ceiling, which was shaking with the stamping
and shuffling of feet on the floor above, listened for a moment to the
piano and then glanced at the girl, who was folding his overcoat
carefully at the end of a shelf.
“Tell me, Lily,” he said in a friendly tone, “do you still go to
school?”
“O no, sir,” she answered. “I’m done schooling this year and more.”
“O, then,” said Gabriel gaily, “I suppose we’ll be going to your
wedding one of these fine days with your young man, eh?”
The girl glanced back at him over her shoulder and said with great
bitterness:
“The men that is now is only all palaver and what they can get out of
you.”
Gabriel coloured as if he felt he had made a mistake and, without
looking at her, kicked off his goloshes and flicked actively with his
muffler at his patent-leather shoes.
He was a stout tallish young man. The high colour of his cheeks pushed
upwards even to his forehead where it scattered itself in a few
formless patches of pale red; and on his hairless face there
scintillated restlessly the polished lenses and the bright gilt rims of
the glasses which screened his delicate and restless eyes. His glossy
black hair was parted in the middle and brushed in a long curve behind
his ears where it curled slightly beneath the groove left by his hat.
When he had flicked lustre into his shoes he stood up and pulled his
waistcoat down more tightly on his plump body. Then he took a coin
rapidly from his pocket.
“O Lily,” he said, thrusting it into her hands, “it’s Christmas-time,
isn’t it? Just ... here’s a little....”
He walked rapidly towards the door.
“O no, sir!” cried the girl, following him. “Really, sir, I wouldn’t
take it.”
“Christmas-time! Christmas-time!” said Gabriel, almost trotting to the
stairs and waving his hand to her in deprecation.
The girl, seeing that he had gained the stairs, called out after him:
“Well, thank you, sir.”
He waited outside the drawing-room door until the waltz should finish,
listening to the skirts that swept against it and to the shuffling of
feet. He was still discomposed by the girl’s bitter and sudden retort.
It had cast a gloom over him which he tried to dispel by arranging his
cuffs and the bows of his tie. He then took from his waistcoat pocket a
little paper and glanced at the headings he had made for his speech. He
was undecided about the lines from Robert Browning for he feared they
would be above the heads of his hearers. Some quotation that they would
recognise from Shakespeare or from the Melodies would be better. The
indelicate clacking of the men’s heels and the shuffling of their soles
reminded him that their grade of culture differed from his. He would
only make himself ridiculous by quoting poetry to them which they could
not understand. They would think that he was airing his superior
education. He would fail with them just as he had failed with the girl
in the pantry. He had taken up a wrong tone. His whole speech was a
mistake from first to last, an utter failure.
Just then his aunts and his wife came out of the ladies’ dressing-room.
His aunts were two small plainly dressed old women. Aunt Julia was an
inch or so the taller. Her hair, drawn low over the tops of her ears,
was grey; and grey also, with darker shadows, was her large flaccid
face. Though she was stout in build and stood erect her slow eyes and
parted lips gave her the appearance of a woman who did not know where
she was or where she was going. Aunt Kate was more vivacious. Her face,
healthier than her sister’s, was all puckers and creases, like a
shrivelled red apple, and her hair, braided in the same old-fashioned
way, had not lost its ripe nut colour.
They both kissed Gabriel frankly. He was their favourite nephew, the
son of their dead elder sister, Ellen, who had married T. J. Conroy of
the Port and Docks.
“Gretta tells me you’re not going to take a cab back to Monkstown
tonight, Gabriel,” said Aunt Kate.
“No,” said Gabriel, turning to his wife, “we had quite enough of that
last year, hadn’t we? Don’t you remember, Aunt Kate, what a cold Gretta
got out of it? Cab windows rattling all the way, and the east wind
blowing in after we passed Merrion. Very jolly it was. Gretta caught a
dreadful cold.”
Aunt Kate frowned severely and nodded her head at every word.
“Quite right, Gabriel, quite right,” she said. “You can’t be too
careful.”