Sean O’Faolain
Sean O’Faolain (1900–1991), the son of a police constable, was born over a pub in Cork. After studying at University College, Cork, he served as a courier and publicity officer for the IRA. It was Joseph Conrad who wrote, in The Secret Agent, “The terrorist and the policeman both come from the same basket.” It is possible this has never been so nearly true. O’Faolain started to have his writing published in 1932. His work includes biographies, travel books, a study of the short story and a memoir. Married to the writer Eileen, he was the father of Julia O’Faolain.
One wet January night, some six months after they had met, young Morgan Myles, our country librarian, was seated in the doctor’s pet armchair, on one side of the doctor’s fire, digesting the pleasant memory of a lavish dinner, while leafing the pages of a heavy photographic album and savouring a warm brandy. From across the hearth the doctor was looking admiringly at his long, ballooning Gaelic head when, suddenly, Morgan let out a cry of delight.
“Good Lord, Frank! There’s a beautiful boy! One of Raphael’s little angels.” He held up the open book for Frank to see. “Who was he?”
The doctor looked across at it and smiled.
“Me. Aged twelve. At school in Mount Saint Bernard.”
“That’s in England. I didn’t know you went to school in England.”
“Alas!”
Morgan glanced down at twelve, and up at sixty.
“It’s not possible, Frank!”
The doctor raised one palm six inches from the arm of his chair and let it fall again.
“It so happened that I was a ridiculously beautiful child.”
“Your mother must have been gone about you. And,” with a smile, “the girls too.”
“I had no interest in girls. Nor in boys either, though by your smile you seem to say so. But there was one boy who took a considerable interest in me.”
Morgan at once lifted his nose like a pointer. At this period of his life he had rested from writing poetry and was trying to write short stories. For weeks he had read nothing but Maupassant. He was going to out-Maupassant Maupassant. He was going to write stories that would make poor old Maupassant turn as green as the grass on his grave.
“Tell me about it,” he ordered. “Tell me every single detail.”
“There is nothing to it. Or at any rate, as I now know, nothing abnormal. But, at that age!” – pointing with his pipestem. “I was as innocent as … Well, as innocent as a child of twelve! Funny that you should say that about Raphael’s angels. At my preparatory school here – it was a French order – Sister Angélique used to call me her petit ange, because, she said, I had ‘une tête d’ange et une voix d’ange.’ She used to make me sing solo for them at Benediction, dressed in a red soutane, a white lacy surplice and a purple bow tie.
“After that heavenly place Mount Saint Bernard was ghastly. Mobs of howling boys. Having to play games; rain, hail or snow. I was a funk at games. When I’d see a fellow charging me at rugger I’d at once pass the ball or kick for touch. I remember the coach cursing me. ‘Breen, you’re a bloody little coward, there are boys half your weight on this field who wouldn’t do a thing like that.’ And the constant discipline. The constant priestly distrust. Watching us like jail warders.”
“Can you give me an example of that?” Morgan begged. “Mind you, you could have had that, too, in Ireland. Think of Clongowes. It turns up in Joyce. And he admired the Jesuits!”
“Yes, I can give you an example. It will show you how innocent I was. A month after I entered Mount Saint Bernard I was so miserable that I decided to write to my mother to take me away. I knew that every letter had to pass under the eyes of the Prefect of Discipline, so I wrote instead to Sister Angélique asking her to pass on the word to my mother. The next day old Father George Lee – he’s long since dead – summoned me to his study. ‘Breen!’ he said darkly, holding up my unfortunate letter, ‘you have tried to do a very underhand thing, something for which I could punish you severely. Why did you write this letter in French?’” The doctor sighed. “I was a very truthful little boy. My mother had brought me up to be truthful simply by never punishing me for anything I honestly owned up to. I said, “I wrote it in French, sir, because I hoped you wouldn’t be able to understand it.” He turned his face away from me but I could tell from his shoulders that he was laughing. He did not cane me, he just tore up the letter, told me never to try to deceive him again, and sent me packing with my tail between my legs.”
“The old bastard!” Morgan said sympathetically, thinking of the lonely little boy.
“No, no! He was a nice old man. And a good classical scholar, I later discovered. But that day as I walked down the long corridor, with all its photographs of old boys who had made good, I felt the chill of the prison walls!”
“But this other boy?” Morgan insinuated, “Didn’t his friendship help at all?”
The doctor rose and stood with his back to the fire staring fixedly in front of him.
(He rises, Morgan thought, his noble eyes shadowed. No! God damn it, no! Not noble. Shadowed? Literary word. Pensive? Blast it, that’s worse. “Pensive eve!” Romantic fudge. His eyes are dark as a rabbit’s droppings. That’s got it! In his soul … Oh, Jase!)
“Since I was so lonely I suppose he must have helped. But he was away beyond me. Miles above me. He was a senior. He was the captain of the school.”
“His name,” Morgan suggested, “was, perhaps, Cyril?”
“We called him Bruiser. I would rather not tell you his real name.”
“Because he is still alive,” Morgan explained, “and remembers you vividly to this day.”
“He was killed at the age of twenty.”
“In the war! In the heat of battle.”
“By a truck in Oxford. Two years after he went up there from Mount Saint Bernard. I wish I knew what happened to him in those two years. I can only hope that before he died he found a girl.”
“A girl? I don’t follow. Oh yes! Of course, yes, I take your point.”
(He remembers with tenderness? No. With loving kindness! No! With benevolence? Dammit, no! With his wonted chivalry to women? But he remembered irritably that the old man sitting opposite to him was a bachelor. And a virgin?)
“What happened between the pair of ye? ‘Brothers and companions in tribulation on the isle that is called Patmos’?”
The doctor snorted.
“Brothers? I have told you I was twelve. Bruiser was eighteen. The captain of the school. Captain of the rugby team. Captain of the tennis team. First in every exam. Tops. Almost a man. I looked up to him as a shining hero. I never understood what he saw in me. I have often thought since that he may have been amused by my innocence. Like the day he said to me, ‘I suppose, Rosy,’ that was my nickname, I had such rosy cheeks, ‘suppose you think you are the best-looking fellow in the school?’ I said, ‘No, I don’t, Bruiser. I think there’s one fellow better-looking than me, Jimmy Simcox.’”
“Which he, of course, loyally refused to believe!”
The old doctor laughed heartily.
“He laughed heartily.”
“A queer sense of humour!”
“I must confess I did not at the time see the joke. Another day he said, ‘Would you like, Rosy, to sleep with me?’”
Morgan’s eyes opened wide. Now they were getting down to it.
“I said, ‘Oh, Bruiser, I don’t think you would like that at all. I’m an awful chatterbox in bed. Whenever I sleep with my Uncle Tom he’s always saying to me, “Will you for God’s sake, stop your bloody gabble and let me sleep.”’ He laughed for five minutes at that.”
“I don’t see much to laugh at. He should have sighed. I will make him sigh. Your way makes him sound a queer hawk. And nothing else happened between ye but this sort of innocent gabble? Or are you keeping something back? Hang it, Frank, there’s no story at all in this!”
“Oh, he used sometimes to take me on his lap. Stroke my bare knee. Ruffle my hair. Kiss me.”
“How did you like that?”
“I made nothing of it. I was used to being kissed by my elders – my mother, my bachelor uncles, Sister Angélique, heaps of people.” The doctor laughed. “I laugh at it now. But his first kiss! A few days before, a fellow named Calvert said to me, ‘Hello, pretty boy, would you give me a smuck?’ I didn’t know what a smuck was. I said, ‘I’m sorry, Calvert, but I haven’t got one.’ The story must have gone around the whole school. The next time I was alone with Bruiser he taunted me. I can hear his angry, toploftical English voice. ‘You are an innocent mug, Rosy! A smuck is a kiss. Would you let me kiss you?’ I said, ‘Why not?’ He put his arm around my neck in a vice and squashed his mouth to my mouth, hard, sticky. I thought I’d choke. ‘O Lord,’ I thought, ‘this is what he gets from playing rugger. This is a rugger kiss.’ And, I was thinking, ‘His poor mother! Having to put up with this from him every morning and every night.’ When he let me go, he said, ‘Did you like that?’ Not wanting to hurt his feelings I said, imitating his English voice, ‘It was all right, Bruiser! A bit like ruggah, isn’t it?’ He laughed again and said, ‘All right? Well, never mind. I shan’t rush you.’”
Morgan waved impatiently.
“Look here, Frank! I want to get the background to all this. The telling detail, you know. ‘The little actual facts’ as Stendhal called them. You said the priests watched you all like hawks. The constant discipline, you said. The constant priestly distrust. How did ye ever manage to meet alone?”
“It was very simple. He was the captain of the school. The apple of their eye. He could fool them. He knew the ropes. After all, he had been there for five years. I remember old Father Lee saying to me once, ‘You are a very lucky boy, Breen, it’s not every junior that the captain of the school would take an interest in. You ought to feel very proud of his friendship.’ We used to have a secret sign about our meetings. Every Wednesday morning when he would be walking out of chapel, leading the procession, if that day was all right for us he used to put his right hand in his pocket. If for any reason it was not all right he would put his left hand in his pocket. I was always on the aisle of the very last row. Less than the dust. Watching for the sign like a hawk. We had a double check. I’d then find a note in my overcoat in the cloakroom. All it ever said was, ‘The same place.’ He was very careful. He only took calculated risks. If he had lived he would have made a marvellous politician, soldier or diplomat.”
“And where would ye meet? I know! By the river. Or in the woods? ‘Enter these enchanted woods ye who dare!’”
“No river. No woods. There was a sort of dirty old trunk room upstairs, under the roof, never used. A rather dark place with only one dormer window. It had double doors. He used to lock the outside one. There was a big cupboard there – for cricket bats or something. ‘If anyone comes,’ he told me, ‘you will have time to pop in there.’ He had it all worked out. Cautious man! I had to be even more cautious, stealing up there alone. One thing that made it easier for us was that I was so much of a junior and he was so very much of a senior, because, you see, those innocent guardians of ours had the idea that the real danger lay between the seniors and the middles, or the middles and the juniors, but never between the seniors and the juniors. They kept the seniors and the middles separated by iron bars and stone walls. Any doctor could have told them that in cold climates like ours the really dangerous years are not from fifteen up but from eighteen to anything, up or down. It simply never occurred to them that any senior could possibly be interested in any way in a junior. I, of course, had no idea of what he was up to. I had not even reached the age of puberty. In fact I honestly don’t believe he quite knew himself what he was up to.”
“But, dammit, you must have had some idea! The secrecy, the kissing, alone, up there in that dim, dusty box room, not a sound but the wind in the slates.”
“Straight from the nuns? Un petit ange? I thought it was all just pally fun.”
Morgan clapped his hands.
“I’ve got it! An idyll! Looking out dreamily over the fields from that dusty dormer window? That’s it, that’s the ticket. Did you ever read that wonderful story by Maupassant – it’s called An Idyll – about two young peasants meeting in a train, a poor, hungry young fellow who has just left home, and a girl with her first baby. He looked so famished that she took pity on him like a mother, opened her blouse and gave him her breast. When he finished he said, ‘That was my first meal in three days.’ Frank! You are telling me the most beautiful story I ever heard in my whole life.”
“You think so?” the doctor said morosely. “I think he was going through hell all that year. At eighteen? On the threshold of manhood? In love with a child of twelve? That is, if you will allow that a youth of eighteen may suffer as much from love as a man twenty years older. To me the astonishing thing is that he did so well all that year at his studies and at sports. Killing the pain of it, I suppose? Or trying to? But the in between? What went on in the poor devil in between?”
Morgan sank back dejectedly.
“I’m afraid this view of the course doesn’t appeal to me at all. All I can see is the idyll idea. After all, I mean, nothing happened!”
Chafing, he watched his friend return to his armchair, take another pipe from the rack, fill it slowly and ceremoniously from a black tobacco jar and light it with care. Peering through the nascent smoke, Morgan leaned slowly forward.
“Or did something happen?”
“Yes,” the doctor resumed quietly. “Every year, at the end of the last term, the departing captain was given a farewell dinner. I felt sad that morning because we had not met for a whole week. And now, in a couple of days we would be scattered and I would never see him again.”
“Ha, ha! You see, you too were in love!”
“Of course I was, I was hooked,” the doctor said with more than a flicker of impatience. “However … That Wednesday as he passed me in the chapel aisle he put his right hand in his pocket. I belted off at once to my coat hanging in the cloakroom and found his note. It said, ‘At five behind the senior tennis court.’ I used always chew up his billet doux immediately I read it. He had ordered me to. When I read this one my mouth went so dry with fear that I could hardly swallow it. He had put me in an awful fix. To meet alone in the box room was risky enough, but for anybody to climb over the wall into the seniors’ grounds was unheard of. If I was caught I would certainly be flogged. I might very well be expelled. And what would my mother and father think of me then? On top of all I was in duty bound to be with all the other juniors at prep at five o’clock, and to be absent from studies without permission was another crime of the first order. After lunch I went to the Prefect of Studies and asked him to excuse me from prep because I had an awful headache. He wasn’t taken in one bit. He just ordered me to be at my place in prep as usual. The law! Orders! Tyranny! There was only one thing for it, to dodge prep, knowing well that whatever else happened later I would pay dearly for it.”
“And what about him? He knew all this. And he knew that if he was caught they couldn’t do anything to him. The captain of the school? Leaving in a few days? It was very unmanly of him to put you to such a risk. His character begins to emerge, and not very pleasantly. Go on!”
The doctor did not need the encouragement. He looked like a small boy sucking a man’s pipe.
“I waited until the whole school was at study and then I crept out into the empty grounds. At that hour the school, the grounds, everywhere, was as silent as the grave. Games over. The priests at their afternoon tea. Their charges safely under control. I don’t know how I managed to get over that high wall, but when I fell scrambling down on the other side, there he was. ‘You’re bloody late,’ he said crossly. ‘How did you get out of prep? What excuse did you give?’ When I told him he flew into a rage. ‘You little fool!’ he growled. ‘You’ve balloxed it all up. They’ll know you dodged. They’ll give you at least ten on the backside for this.’ He was carrying a cane. Seniors at Saint Bernard’s did carry walking sticks. I’d risked so much for him, and now he was so angry with me that I burst into tears. He put his arms around me – I thought, to comfort me – but after that all I remember from that side of the wall was him pulling down my short pants, holding me tight, I felt something hard, like his cane, and the next thing I knew I was wet. I thought I was bleeding. I thought he was gone mad. When I smelled whiskey I thought, ‘He is trying to kill me.’ ‘Now run,’ he ordered me, ‘and get back to prep as fast as you can.’”
Morgan covered his eyes with his hand.
“He shoved me up to the top of the wall. As I peered around I heard his footsteps running away. I fell down into the shrubs on the other side and I immediately began to vomit and vomit. There was a path beside the shrubs. As I lay there puking I saw a black-soutaned priest approaching slowly along the path. He was an old, old priest named Constable. I did not stir. Now, I felt, I’m for it. This is the end. I am certain he saw me but he passed by as if he had not seen me. I got back to the study hall, walked up to the Prefect’s desk and told him I was late because I had been sick. I must have looked it because he at once sent me to the matron in the infirmary. She took my temperature and put me to bed. It was summer. I was the only inmate of the ward. One of those evenings of prolonged daylight.”
“You poor little bugger!” Morgan groaned in sympathy.
“A detail comes back to me. It was the privilege of seniors attending the captain’s dinner to send down gifts to the juniors’ table – sweets, fruit, a cake, for a younger brother or some special protégé. Bruiser ordered a whole white blancmange with a rosy cherry on top of it to be sent to me. He did not know I was not in the dining hall so the blacmange was brought up to me in the infirmary. I vomited again when I saw it. The matron, with my more than ready permission, took some of it for herself and sent the rest back to the juniors’ table, ‘with Master Breen’s compliments.’ I am sure it was gobbled greedily. In the morning the doctor saw me and had me sent home to Ireland immediately.”
“Passing the buck,” said Morgan sourly, and they both looked at a coal that tinkled from the fire into the fender.
The doctor peered quizzically at the hissing coal.
“Well?” he slurred around his pipestem. “There is your lovely idyll.”
Morgan did not lift his eyes from the fire. Under a downdraft from the chimney a few specks of grey ashes moved clockwise on the worn hearth. He heard a car hissing past the house on the wet macadam. His eyebrows had gone up over his spectacles in two Gothic arches.
“I am afraid,” he said at last, “it is no go. Not even a Maupassant could have made a story out of it. And Chekhov wouldn’t have wanted to try. Unless the two boys lived on, and on, and met years afterwards in Moscow or Yalta or somewhere, each with a wife and a squad of kids, and talked of everything except their schooldays. You are sure you never did hear of him, or from him, again?”
“Never! Apart from the letter he sent with the blancmange and the cherry.”
Morgan at once leaped alive.
“A letter? Now we are on to something! What did he say to you in it? Recite every word of it to me! Every syllable. I’m sure you have not forgotten one word of it. No!” he cried excitedly. “You have kept it. Hidden away somewhere all these years. Friendship surviving everything. Fond memories of …”
The doctor sniffed.
“I tore it into bits unread and flushed it down the W.C.”
“Oh, God blast you, Frank!” Morgan roared. “That was the climax of the whole thing. The last testament. The final revelation. The summing up. The document humain. And you ‘just tore it up!’ Let’s reconstruct it. ‘Dearest Rosy, As long as I live I will never forget your innocence, your sweetness, your …’”
“My dear boy!” the doctor protested mildly. “I am sure he wrote nothing of the sort. He was much too cautious, and even the captain was not immune from censorship. Besides, sitting in public glory at the head of the table? It was probably a place-card with something on the lines of, ‘All my sympathy, sorry, better luck next term.’ A few words, discreet, that I could translate any way I liked.”
Morgan raised two despairing arms.
“If that was all the damned fellow could say to you after that appalling experience, he was a character of no human significance whatever, a shallow creature, a mere agent, a catalyst, a cad. The story becomes your story.”
“I must admit I have always looked on it in that way. After all it did happen to me… Especially in view of the sequel.”
“Sequel? What sequel? I can’t have sequels. In a story you always have to observe unity of time, place and action. Everything happening at the one time, in the same place, between the same people. The Necklace. Boule de Suif. The Maison Tellier. The examples are endless. What was this bloody sequel?”
The doctor puffed thoughtfully.
“In fact there were two sequels. Even three sequels. And all of them equally important.”
“In what way were they important?”
“It was rather important to me that after I was sent home I was in the hospital for four months. I could not sleep. I had constant nightmares, always the same one – me running through a wood and him running after me with his cane. I could not keep down my food. Sweating hot. Shivering cold. The vomiting was recurrent. I lost weight. My mother was beside herself with worry. She brought doctor after doctor to me, and only one of them spotted it, an old, blind man from Dublin named Whiteside. He said, ‘That boy has had some kind of shock,’ and in private he asked me if some boy, or man, had interfered with me. Of course, I denied it hotly.”
“I wish I was a doctor,” Morgan grumbled. “So many writers were doctors. Chekhov. William Carlos Williams. Somerset Maugham. A.J. Cronin.”
The doctor ignored the interruption.
“The second sequel was that when I at last went back to Mount Saint Bernard my whole nature changed. Before that I had been dreamy and idle. During my last four years at school I became their top student. I suppose psychologists would say nowadays that I compensated by becoming extroverted. I became a crack cricket player. In my final year I was the college champion at billiards. I never became much good at rugger but I no longer minded playing it and I wasn’t all that bad. If I’d been really tops at it, or at boxing, or swimming I might very well have ended up as captain of the school. Like him.”
He paused for so long that Morgan became alerted again.
“And the third sequel?” he prompted.
“I really don’t know why I am telling you all this. I have never told a soul about it before. Even still I find it embarrassing to think about, let alone to talk about. When I left Mount Saint Bernard and had taken my final at the College of Surgeons I went on to Austria to continue my medical studies. In Vienna I fell in with a young woman. The typical blonde fräulein, handsome, full of life, outgoing, wonderful physique, what you might call an outdoor girl, free as the wind, frank as the daylight. She taught me skiing. We used to go mountain climbing together. I don’t believe she knew the meaning of the word fear. She was great fun and the best of company. Her name was Brigitte. At twenty-six she was already a woman of the world. I was twenty-four, and as innocent of women as … as …”
To put him at his ease Morgan conceded his own embarrassing confession.
“As I am, at twenty-four.”
“You might think that what I am going to mention could not happen to a doctor, however young, but on our first night in bed, immediately she touched my body I vomited. I pretended to her that I had eaten something that upset me. You can imagine how nervous I felt all through the next day wondering what was going to happen that night. Exactly the same thing happened that night. I was left with no option. I told her the whole miserable story of myself and Bruiser twelve years before. As I started to tell her I had no idea how she was going to take it. Would she leave me in disgust? Be coldly sympathetic? Make a mock of me? Instead, she became wild with what I can only call gleeful curiosity. ‘Tell me more, mein Schätzerl,’ she begged. ‘Tell me everything! What exactly did he do to you? I want to know it all. This is wunderbar. Tell me! Oh do tell me!’ I did tell her, and on the spot everything became perfect between us. We made love like Trojans. That girl saved my sanity.”
In a silence Morgan gazed at him. Then coldly: –
“Well, of course, this is another story altogether. I mean I don’t see how I can possibly blend these two themes together. I mean no writer worth his salt can say things like, ‘Twelve long years passed over his head. Now read on.’ I’d have to leave her out of it. She is obviously irrelevant to the main theme. Whatever the hell the main theme is.” Checked by an ironical glance he poured the balm. “Poor Frank! I foresee it all. You adored her. You wanted madly to marry her. Her parents objected. You were star-crossed lovers. You had to part.”
“I never thought of marrying the bitch. She had the devil’s temper. We had terrible rows. Once we threw plates at one another. We would have parted anyway. She was a lovely girl but quite impossible. Anyway, towards the end of that year my father fell seriously ill. Then my mother fell ill. Chamberlain was in Munich that year. Everybody knew the war was coming. I came back to Ireland that autumn. For keeps.
“But you tried again and again to find out what happened to her. And failed. She was swallowed up in the fire and smoke of war. I don’t care what you say, Frank, you must have been heartbroken.”
The doctor lifted a disinterested shoulder.
“A student’s love affair? Of thirty and more years ago?”
No! He had never enquired. Anyway if she was alive now what would she be but a fat, blowsy old baggage of sixty-three? Morgan, though shocked, guffawed dutifully. There was the real Maupassant touch. In his next story a touch like that! The clock on the mantelpiece whirred and began to tinkle the hour. Morgan opened the album for a last look at the beautiful child. Dejectedly he slammed it shut, and rose.
“There is too much in it,” he declared. “Too many strands. Your innocence. His ignorance. Her worldliness. Your forgetting her. Remembering him. Confusion and bewilderment. The ache of loss? Loss? Lost Innocence? Would that be a theme? But nothing rounds itself off. You are absolutely certain you never heard of him again after that day behind the tennis courts?”
They were both standing now. The rain brightly spotted the midnight window.
“In my first year in Surgeons, about three years after Bruiser was killed, I lunched one day with his mother and my mother at the Shelbourne Hotel in Dublin. By chance they had been educated at the same convent in England. They talked about him. My mother said, ‘Frank here knew him in Mount Saint Bernard.’ His mother smiled condescendingly at me. ‘No, Frank. You were too young to have met him.’ ‘Well,’ I said, ‘I did actually speak to him a couple of times, and he was always very kind to me.’ She said sadly, ‘He was kind to everybody. Even to perfect strangers.’”
Morgan thrust out an arm and a wildly wagging finger.
“Now, there is a possible shape! Strangers to begin. Strangers to end! What a title! Perfect Strangers.” He blew out a long, impatient breath and shook his head. “But that is a fourth sequel! I’ll think about it,” as if he were bestowing a great favour. “But it isn’t a story as it stands. I would have to fake it up a lot. Leave out things. Simplify. Mind you, I could still see it as an idyll. Or I could if only you hadn’t torn up his last, farewell letter, which I still don’t believe at all said what you said it said. If only we had that letter I bet you any money we could haul in the line and land our fish.”
The doctor knocked out the dottle of his pipe against the fireguard, and throating a yawn looked at the fading fire.
“I am afraid I have been boring you with my reminiscences.”
“Not at all, Frank! By no means! I was most interested in your story. And I do honestly mean what I said. I really will think about it. I promise. Who was it,” he asked in the hall as he shuffled into his overcoat and his muffler and moved out to the wet porch, the tail of his raincoat rattling in the wind, “said that the two barbs of childhood are its innocence and its ignorance?” He failed to remember. He threw up his hand. “Ach, to hell with it for a story! It’s all too bloody convoluted for me. And to hell with Maupassant, too! That vulgarian oversimplified everything. And he’s full of melodrama. A besotted Romantic at heart! Like all the bloody French.”
The doctor peeped out at him through three inches of door. Morgan, standing with his back to the arrowy night, suddenly lit up as if a spotlight had shone on his face.
“I know what I’ll do with it!” he cried. “I’ll turn it into a poem about a seashell!”
“About a seashell!”
“Don’t you remember?” In his splendid voice Morgan chanted above the rain and wind: – “‘A curious child holding to his ear/ The convolutions of a smoothlipped seashell/ To which, in silence hushed …’ How the hell does it go? ‘… his very soul listened to the murmurings of his native sea.’ It’s as clear as daylight, man! You! Me! Everyone! Always wanting to launch a boat in search of some far-off golden sands. And something or somebody always holding us back. ‘The Curious Child’. There’s a title!”
“Ah, well!” the doctor said, peering at him blankly. “There it is! As your friend Maupassant might have said, ‘C’est la vie!’”
“La vie!” Morgan roared, now on the gravel beyond the porch, indifferent to the rain pelting on his bare head. “That trollop? She’s the one who always bitches up everything. No, Frank! For me there is only one fountain of truth, one beauty, one perfection. Art, Frank! Art! and bugger la vie!”
At the untimely verb the doctor’s drooping eyelids shot wide open.
“It is a view,” he said courteously and let his hand be shaken fervently a dozen times.
“I can never repay you, Frank. A splendid dinner. A wonderful story. Marvellous inspiration. I must fly. I’ll be writing it all night!” – and vanished head down through the lamplit rain, one arm uplifted triumphantly behind him.
The doctor slowly closed his door, carefully locked it, bolted it, tested it, and prudently put its chain in place. He returned to his sitting room, picked up the cinder that had fallen into the hearth and tossed it back into the remains of his fire, then stood, hand on mantelpiece, looking down at it. What a marvellous young fellow! He would be tumbling and tossing all night over that story. Then he would be around in the morning apologizing, and sympathizing, saying, “Of course, Frank, I do realize that it was a terribly sad experience for both of you.”
Gazing at the ashes his whole being filled with memory after memory like that empty vase in his garden being slowly filled by drops of rain.