Mary, Mary

be medicined by male kisses? Nature and precedent have both sworn to it⁠ ⁠… But she was out of reach; his hand, high-flung as it might be, could not get to her. He went furiously to the Phoenix Park, to St. Stephen’s Green, to outlying leafy spots and sheltered lanes, but she was in none of these places. He even prowled about the neighbourhood of her home and could not meet her. Once he had seen Mary as she came along the road, and he drew back into a doorway. A young man was marching by her side, a young man who gabbled without ceasing and to whom Mary chattered again with an equal volubility. As they passed by Mary caught sight of him, and her face went flaming. She caught her companion’s arm, and they hurried down the road at a great pace⁠ ⁠… She had never chattered to him. Always he had done the talking, and she had been an obedient, grateful listener. Nor did he quarrel with her silence, but her reserve shocked him; it was a pretence⁠—worse, a lie⁠—a masked and hooded falsehood. She had surrendered to him willingly, and yet drew about her a protective armour of reserve wherein she skulked immune to the arms which were lawfully victorious. Is there, then, no loot for a conqueror? We demand the keys of the City Walls and unrestricted entry, or our torches shall blaze again. This chattering Mary was a girl whom he had never caught sight of at all. She had been hiding from him even in his presence. In every aspect she was an anger. But she could talk to the fellow with her⁠ ⁠… a skinny whippersnapper, whom the breath of a man could shred into remote, eyeless vacuity. Was this man another insult? Did she not even wait to bury her dead? Pah! she was not value for his thought. A girl so lightly facile might be blown from here to there and she would scarcely notice the difference. Here and there were the same places to her, and him and him were the same person. A girl of that type comes to a bad end: he had seen it often, the type and the end, and never separate. Can one not prophesy from facts? He saw a slut in a slum, a drab hovering by a dark entry, and the vision cheered him mightily for one glowing minute and left him unoccupied for the next, into which she thronged with the flutter of wings and the sound of a great mocking.

His aunt tracked his brows back to the responsible duties of his employment, and commiserated with him, and made a lamentation about matters with which he never had been occupied, so that the last tag of his good manners departed from him, and he damned her unswervingly into consternation. That other pleasant girl, whose sweetness he had not so much tasted as sampled, had taken to brooding in his presence: she sometimes drooped an eye upon him like a question⁠ ⁠… Let her look out or maybe he’d blaze into her teeth: howl menace down her throat until she swooned. Someone should yield to him a visible and tangible agony to balance his. Does law probe no deeper than the pillage of a watch? Can one filch our self-respect and escape free? Shall not our souls also sue for damages against its aggressor? Some person rich enough must pay for his lacerations or there was less justice in heaven than in the Police Courts; and it might be that girl’s lot to expiate the sins of Mary. It would be a pleasure, if a sour one, to make somebody wriggle as he had, and somebody should wriggle; of that he was blackly determined.

XXIX

Indeed, Mrs. Cafferty’s lodger and Mary had become quite intimate, and it was not through the machinations of either that this had happened. Ever since Mrs. Makebelieve had heard of that young man’s appetite, and the miseries through which he had to follow it, she had been deeply concerned on his behalf. She declined to believe that the boy ever got sufficient to eat, and she enlarged to her daughter on the seriousness of this privation to a young man. Disabilities, such as a young girl could not comprehend, followed in the train of insufficient nourishment. Mrs. Cafferty was her friend, and was, moreover, a good decent woman against whom the tongue of rumour might wag in vain; but Mrs. Cafferty was the mother of six children, and her natural kindliness dared not expand to their detriment. Furthermore, the fact of her husband being out of work tended to still further circumscribe the limits of her generosity. She divined a lean pot in the Cafferty household, and she saw the young man getting only as much food as Mrs. Cafferty dared to give him, so that the pangs of his hunger almost gnawed at her own vitals. Under these circumstances she had sought for an opportunity to become better acquainted with him, and had very easily succeeded; so when Mary found him seated on their bed and eating violently of their half-loaf, if she was astonished at first she was also very glad. Her mother watched the demolition of their food with a calm happiness, for although the amount she could contribute was small, every little helped, and not alone were his wants assisted, but her friend Mrs. Cafferty and her children were also aided by this dulling of an appetite which might have endangered their household peace.

The young man repaid their hospitality by an easy generosity of speech covering affairs which neither Mrs. Makebelieve nor her daughter had many opportunities for studying. He spoke of those very interesting matters with which a young man is concerned, and his speculations on various subjects, while often quite ignorant, were sufficiently vivid to be interesting and were wrong in a boyish fashion which was not unpleasant. He was very argumentative,