Hughie

I know we should all have respected Doctor Hugh Daly more. I know we
shouldn’t have laughed; that he was a self-made man, a man who had
risen by his own efforts; a specimen of the new Irish democracy and all
the rest of it; I know all that; but to us he was just plain Hughie,
and Hughie he will remain to his dying day. Mind you, you couldn’t help
liking him, and we always began by admitting that; we liked him, we
loved him; we agreed that he deserved every credit, but it always ended
by somebody saying ‘Ah, Jay, do you remember when he was a curate in
Jackie Roche’s pub?’ and from that on, we laughed and laughed.

That, by the way, was true. I mean, about his being a curate in
Roche’s. You would go in for a drink and find Hughie in his shirt
sleeves, reading a book; a handsome, melancholy-looking man with a long
thin face, dark, piercing eyes, and a shrill, monotonous, penetrating
voice that was almost as inhuman as a bird’s cry. He had a ravishing
smile, a smile that flooded every inch of his face, but it was like
winter sunlight, and when it faded his face relapsed into the most
appalling melancholy.

‘What’s that you’re reading?’ you’d ask, by the way of no harm.

‘Ah, a small thing,’ Hughie would say, tightening his thin little
lips. ‘A little philosophy book.’

‘Oh, and what the blazes use is philosophy to you?’ you’d ask.

‘What use is philosophy to me?’ he would cry, growing quite angry. ‘Ah,
musha, what sort of education would a man have without a bit of
philosophy? Look, now, here by my hand on the shelf! What do you see?’

‘What else only a bottle?’ you’d say cautiously, wondering what trick
he was playing on you.

‘O! O! O!’ Hughie would wail. ‘I’m surprised at you, positively
surprised at you! I wouldn’t mind if ’twas only a poor working man, but
a man like you, a university man! You do not, indeed, see a bottle. Far
from it! What you see, my friend is only one side of a bottle. You
deduce the existence of the bottle.’

He grew quite angry about it, even embittered. Once he did it to a
crowd of quay-labourers, and they were sure he was ridiculing them, and
smashed a couple of dozen bottles before the guards succeeded in
clearing the pub. Hughie, of course, was the principal witness.

‘Now, Mr. Daly,’ said Phil Regan, the labourers’ solicitor, in his most
earnest tones, ‘what damage do you say these poor men did?’

‘They broke seven bottles of wine and two bottles of whiskey,’ said
Hughie.

‘Now, are you sure of that, Mr. Daly? Remember, you’re on your oath!’

‘Ah, my goodness,’ wailed Hughie, ‘didn’t I see it with my own two
eyes?’

‘Oh, Mr. Daly, Mr. Daly,’ exclaimed Regan, ‘I’m surprised at you! I am
indeed! If it was a poor man like one of my clients, but an educated
man like yourself! Sure doesn’t the whole world know that ’twas only
the side of the damage you saw? You deduced the existence of the
damage.’

The whole court began to laugh; Hughie laughed as well, for he had a
great gift of laughing at his own absurdities; his mind brightened and
clouded as rapidly as his face; but poor Jackie Roche had no cause for
laughing, and Hughie decided on a change of career.

‘Ah,’ he sighed, ‘the people in this country have no respect for
education! No respect, no respect! I’m going in for the law.’

‘Why the law?’ somebody asked.

‘Ah, my goodness,’ said Hughie, ‘what a noble career! I can see myself
like Daniel O’Connell rescuing poor innocent men from the gallows.’

It was Phil Regan, the solicitor, who persuaded him to go for medicine
instead; of course, by persuading him that it was by far the nobler
career of the two; Hughie’s ideals were nothing if not exalted. That
was one thing that made for Hughie’s success; he took advice. Another
was the way he worked; he surprised us all, because many a day the poor
devil must have gone without his dinner, and but for Phil Regan’s help
he would scarcely have got through his course at all. They were the
best of friends; the most strangely assorted pair one could
imagine. Phil was a toady and diner-out who was forever making fun of
the new democracy; small, rosy, plump, popeyed, with eyebrows like
angle irons—his most expressive feature—and three deep lines across
his forehead that emphasised them; a forelock in three little loppery
ringlets, like a baby’s. A civil servant’s wife couldn’t drop a brick
but Phil was there to pick it up and hand it back to her. Hughie was
tall, lank and miserable, and could never get any of the social details
right. Phil chose his clothes for him; his ties, his stockings; Phil
told him what knives to use, what tips to give. Every mess that Hughie
was in—and he was always in some mess—he came to Phil to help him
out; and then the savage streak in Phil appeared, and he began to mock
Hughie till the two of them were at one another’s throats.

‘I despise you, Mr. Regan,’ Hughie would say in a rasping voice which
he took to be cold and dignified, while his neck swelled and his lean
face grew purple, ‘I despise you. You are nothing but a base
materialist, a man without spirituality, without idealism or vision.’

‘And what are you, Hughie?’ Phil would ask, getting cooler and more
murderous at every word.

‘I am an idealist,’ Hughie would say in a trembling voice. ‘A man with
his eyes always on the stars. I wish to God I never met you. You’ve
dragged me down with you, into the gutter.’

‘But, Hughie,’ Phil squeaked, the laughter coo-coo-cooing in his
throat, his angle irons shooting up into his bulgy forehead, ‘what
would you do without me? Wasn’t it I made you? You’re not going to
pretend that the Almighty God ever made a man like you? I made you, out
of nothing. Even that tie you’re wearing, Hughie. I chose it for you,
and I showed you how to tie it. Only for me, Hughie, you’d be wearing a
made-up tie.’

‘There!’ Hughie said in a frenzy, tearing off his tie and trampling on
it, ‘I trample on the tie as I trample on you and your abominable
atheism. Leave me alone, please! Never let me set eyes on you again.’

Next day they would have made it up and be as thick as ever, and Phil
would have another yarn about Hughie’s vagaries. They couldn’t exist
apart—Pygmalion and Galatea: an artist and his creation.

Hughie was the oddest doctor that ever left a university. He had a
bedroom manner, picked up from Phil, which was guaranteed to scare the
wits out of a rugby footballer. Because he liked to air his knowledge
to patients and their friends, he sat on the edge of the bed with his
hands on his knees and a meditative air; thinking aloud, and
enumerating every possible diagnosis with its complications. When he
had bad news for relations he almost wept. Masses!’ he would say
sorrowfully, shaking his head. ‘Masses!’ He did that once in a house
and they said when he went to the bathroom to wash his hands he called
out brightly, ‘Mrs. Kinsella, your cistern is out of order and I’m
going to fix it for you.’

It was amazing how he got on, in spite of it all. He often talked of
marriage. Phil urged him on to it. He even had the woman for him;
another doctor, neither too young nor too good-looking but with a
rising family behind her and an excellent practice.

‘You see, Hughie,’ said Phil, ‘it’ll be the making of you.’

‘Oh, I know, I know,’ Hughie said sadly. They were walking in the
moonlight along the bank of the river.

‘You’re only at the beginning of your career, man! There’s nothing you
can’t hope for.’

‘Ah,’ Hughie wailed, ‘that is true; I know it; butI am a strange man,
Phil. I cannot do without poetry.’

‘Poetry? You have as much poetry in your constitution as a fried
egg. You can have all the poetry you want on one month of Tessie
Delaney’s income.’

‘Regan,’ said Hughie seriously, with a throb of indignation in his
voice, ‘you are a very coarse man. I really don’t know why I stand your
company at all.’

‘Well, I’ll tell you,’ hissed Phil. ‘Because I’m the only one that
leads the sort of life you’d like to lead; the life you would have led
if only you’d been brought up in a civilised country. Damn it, man,
don’t you see what I’m trying to do for you? I’m trying to humanise
you. What you need is mistresses; scores of mistresses, to take the
Celtic chill out of your blood.’

‘Ah, go away you blackguard,’ said Hughie with a flattered laugh.

‘But it’s true for me. Oh, I know what you really did when you went to
Paris with Jimmie O’Brien. You went to the Folies Bergéres and you
hissed! Yes, you hissed! You’re a little coward.’

‘Sir,’ said Hughie magnificently, ‘I allow nobody to call me a coward.’

‘Go to hell and marry your waitress,’ said Phil.

But for some reason Hughie was very slow about taking Phil’s excellent
advice. He did something he had never done before. He asked advice of a
young girl in the house where he was lodging. She was a tall pale-gold
scared-looking girl, a post office clerk, who looked like a figure out
of a Rossetti picture.

‘’Tis a serious choice,’ Hughie said. ‘Of course, I have my career to
think of. Up to this I got on well; fairly well; he added, with a
melancholy air, for fear he might have committed himself too far; ‘I
have nothing really to complain of. But as Phil says ’tis a man’s
marriage decided what way he’s to go when he’s over forty. Many a good
doctor made a mess of his life because of some good-looking nurse he
got too close to in a hospital ward.’

‘Indeed, yes, doctor,’ said the girl, ‘I suppose ’tis a danger.’

‘’Tis a terrible danger,’ wailed Hughie. ‘Ah, sha, don’t I know it
well?’

‘I think your friend gave you very good advice,’ she said.

‘Ah yes,’ sighed Hughie, ‘but of a wet winter evening when I come home
after a hard day’s work, in and out of stuffy rooms, and I come in here
and see the fire lighting, I sometimes imagine I see a little gold head
in an armchair beside the fire. I’m a lonely man, Miss Foley; you
mightn’t think it, but I suffer the torments of the damned from
melancholia, and sometimes when I wake in the morning, and hear the
little birds singing outside my window I wonder to myself what are they
singing for, and whether ’tis worth it all. And Doctor Delaney won’t
cure me of my melancholia, Miss Foley! Indeed, she won’t! Far from it!’

‘But how do you know that anyone else will?’ she asked.

‘Ah, now, wasn’t I right?’ Hughie said, laughing and staring at her in
admiration. ‘I knew when I saw you that you were a girl after my own
heart. You have none of those foolish notions that girls pick up out of
books. You are a sensible girl! Love is all very well; it is a pleasant
illusion; indeed, yes; but it does not last and a practice does.’

He promised to speak immediately to Doctor Delaney about it, and the
servant in the lodging house reported that he had a big box of
chocolates in the top drawer of his dressing table. But he said no more
about it to Miss Foley, and it was she who opened the subject herself
to him one night when they found themselves alone in the sitting room.

‘Did you speak to Doctor Delaney yet, Doctor Daly?’ she asked.

‘Ah, no, no,’ Hughie replied with a pained look, his dark eyes
piercing her and his little thin lips setting into a firmer line. ‘Not
yet, but I will. I will do it soon. Dear me, I know well it is a
chance I shouldn’t let slip.’

‘Still, I wonder,’ she said with a worried look. She was a serious
little soul with the face of a saint, and a shy pale smile that always
trembled on the verge of tears. ‘I don’t know, of course, but,
listening to you, I wondered whether there wasn’t somebody else you
preferred to the doctor.’

‘Yes,’ Hughie admitted tightly, ‘there is.’

‘And does she care for you, doctor?’ she asked shyly.

‘Perhaps she does,’ Hughie said with a broad smile that faded in the
queer way his brightest smiles always faded, into a look of blank and
utter melancholia.

Then don’t you think you mightn’t be doing the wisest thing after all?
Haven’t you money enough? What use will more money be to you if you
don’t love Doctor Delaney?’

‘What use will money be to me?’ Hughie asked in exasperation, his voice
growing shriller. ‘Ah, Miss Foley, a man like me that knows what
poverty is like doesn’t talk that way. Indeed no! And what is love that
a man should give up all his chances in life for it? I knew all about
it when I was your age. I was in love with a girl in Kerry; a simple
girl; a labourer’s daughter. It was with her that I really knew what
love meant. I still have some of the letters she wrote me when I went
away. Will I read one of them to you?’

‘If you like, Doctor Daly,’ she said with a startled air.

‘Indeed, I’ll do nothing of the kind,’ said Hughie impatiently. ‘What a
thing I’d do! There! Read it for yourself. ’Tis only a simple letter,
written by an uneducated girl.’

She read it, with a half-smile on her lips.

‘And you never went back?’ she asked.

‘Ah, how could I go back?’ asked Hughie angrily, his lips set, his eyes
piercing hers. ‘I had my career to think of. How could I think of
getting married at that age, with all my studies before me?... Ah,’ he
cried, gazing at the ceiling, ‘I wonder who she married after? Some
farmer, I suppose, or some poor labourer like her father. And sometimes
I wonder in the evenings when her husband is out at the pub, and the
children are asleep, does she ever think of the old days when we used
to go walking together. Ah, dear me!’

Miss Foley got up with her weak smile.

‘There’s your letter, Doctor Daly,’ she said. ‘I think men are awful,
with nothing in their minds only money and advancement.’

He saw tears in her eyes but before he could reply to her, she had left
the room and gone upstairs to her own bedroom. Hughie smiled, folded
the Kerry girl’s letter and put it back in his wallet.

Next evening when Miss Foley came in from work he was waiting for her
in the hall and called her into the sitting room.

‘I have some news for you,’ he said with a laugh.

‘Is it all settled?’ she asked eagerly.

‘Ah, is what settled?’ he asked angrily.

‘About the doctor?’ she said with her timid smile. 1 thought that was
what you were going to tell me.’

‘Ah,’ he said in a fury, ‘what is all this talk about the doctor? What
has the doctor to do with it?’

‘But you said you wanted to marry her,’ she persisted with a nervous
laugh. ‘You did, doctor, you did really.’

‘Ah, I never thought of marrying that black devil,’ said Hughie, with a
thundercloud on his face. ‘What a fool I’d be!’

‘Then it’s the other girl you’re going to marry?’

‘You’re getting nearer it,’ replied Hughie with a shy smile.

‘And it’s all settled?’

‘It will be soon, I hope.’

‘I’m so glad,’ she said earnestly. ‘I think you’re doing the right
thing. I think you’ll make a good husband, and that God will bless your
marriage.’

‘I think so too,’ said Hughie.

‘But you must get it settled soon,’ she said with her eager laugh. ‘You
mustn’t put it off and off while you make up your mind. Remember she
has a mind to make up too. You may be late, Doctor Daly.’

‘I needn’t put it off any longer,’ he said angelically.

‘Well, don’t! Do it to-night!’

‘I’m doing it now,’ he said cryptically, his head bowed, ‘this very
minute.’

She looked at him with a puzzled frown.

‘Now, Doctor Daly?’

‘Ah,’ he said, ‘sure you must have known?’

‘Do you mean me, Doctor Daly?’ she asked incredulously.

‘Ah, of course I do, who else?’ he said shortly. He was a little put
out by her evident surprise.

‘But, but’ her mouth laughed while her eyes were troubled, ‘I couldn’t
possibly marry you.’

‘Why not?’ Hughie’s voice was as shrill as an angry seabird’s and he
stared at her in a startled way.

‘Because I’m engaged to be married to somebody else. He isn’t a doctor
or anything of the kind. He’s only a clerk in the Post Office, but I’m
very fond of him, and we’re going to get married as soon as we can save
enough.’

‘Oh, oh, oh!’ Hughie cried in an agonised voice, hitting himself on the
temples with his fist. ‘Isn’t this terrible? And what am I going to do
now?’

‘I’m sure there are lots of girls who’d be proud to marry you. Maybe
you might even think of that poor girl in Kerry,’ she suggested timidly
with sudden emotion. ‘Maybe she never got married after all. She may
still be waiting for you.’

‘Ah,’ he said cantankerously, ‘what girl in Kerry? There’s no girl in
Kerry.’

‘But, doctor, you showed me a letter from her! And I thought you were
cruel; honestly, I did. I thought if you were the man I imagined you
were you’d have gone back and married that poor girl; even if she
wasn’t as grand as some of your grand friends. She might have made you
a better wife than any of them.’

‘But when I tell you there’s no girl in Kerry,’ said Hughie
indignantly. ‘There never was a girl in Kerry. I wrote that letter
myself because I thought it would interest you. But I see now you were
a stupid sort of girl. you did not understand what was in my mind at
all, I don’t know now what I’m going to do. I must go and ask advice of
Phil Regan.’

He did, and Phil strode around the room chuckling as he listened to
the story. Then he drove Hughie straight to the doctor’s, to
anticipate any possibility of its reaching her ears first. Hughie came
out pale but engaged, and is now easily the most successful doctor in
the county. It was said that Phil had to be restrained from
accompanying them on the honeymoon. But what is quiet certain is that
he and Phil are now strangers, because Mrs. Daly did not think Phil
sufficiently well-mannered for the society to which she was
accustomed. Phil could hardly believe his ears when first he was
refused admittance. He and Hughie met a few days later in a pub.

‘Here,’ Phil said, ‘what’s all this about your wife and me?’

‘Ah, marriage, marriage!’ sighed Hughie cryptically.

‘You’re not going to pretend you’re happy with that woman?’

‘Indeed, I am happy,’ said Hughie indignantly. ‘Of course,’ he
continued in a wail, ‘life is not a bed of roses for anyone. Dear me,
no.’

‘And you’re going to let that jade prevent our meeting again?’

‘Ah, to be sure, I’ll meet you often enough,’ said Hughie.

‘You won’t invite me to your house?’

‘Ah, confound it, man!’ cried Hughie hammering the counter, ‘wasn’t it
you made me marry her? Wasn’t it you with all your old blather that led
me astray? It serves you right.’

And then, his sense of humour overcoming him, he chuckled, shook his
head and went home exultantly.


(1941)