A Great Man

Once when I was visiting a famous London hospital, I met the matron,
Miss Fitzgerald, a small, good-looking woman of fifty. She was Irish,
and we discussed acquaintances in common until I mentioned Dermot
O’Malley, and then I realized that somehow or other I had said the
wrong thing. The matron frowned and went away. A few minutes later she
returned, smiling, and asked me to lunch in a way that, for some
reason, reminded me of a girl asking a young fellow for the first time
to her home. “You know, Dr. O’Malley was a great friend of my father,”
she said abruptly and then frowned again.

“Begor, I was,” said O’Malley when I reported this to him later. “And
I’ll tell you a story about it, what’s more.” O’Malley is tall and
gentle, and has a wife who is a pain in the neck, though he treats her
with a consideration that I can only describe as angelic. “It was when
I was a young doctor in Dublin, and my old professor, Dwyer, advised
me to apply for a job in the hospital in Dooras. Now, you never heard
of Dooras, but we all knew about it then, because that was in the days
of Margaret’s father, old Jim Fitzgerald, and he was known, all right.

“I met him a couple of nights later in a hotel in Kildare Street. He
had come up to Dublin to attend a meeting of doctors. He was a man
with piercing eyes and a long, hard face—more the face of a soldier
than a doctor. The funny thing was his voice, which was rather high
and piping and didn’t seem to go at all with his manner.

“‘Dooras is no place for a young man who likes entertainment,’ he
said.

“‘Ah, I’m a country boy myself,’ said I, ‘so that wouldn’t worry
me. And of course, I know the hospital has a great reputation.’

“‘So I understand,’ he said grimly. ‘You see, O’Malley, I don’t believe
in all this centralization that’s going on. I know it’s all for the
sake of equipment, and equipment is a good thing, too, but it’s taking
medicine away from where it belongs. One of these days, when their
centralization breaks down, they’ll find they haven’t hospitals,
doctors, or anything else.’

“By the time I’d left him, I’d as good as accepted the job, and it
wasn’t the job that interested me so much as the man. It could be
that, my own father having been a bit of a waster, I’m attracted to
men of strong character, and Fitzgerald was a fanatic. I liked that
about him.

“Now, Dwyer had warned me that I’d find Dooras queer, and Dwyer knew
the Dublin hospitals weren’t up to much, but Dooras was dotty. It was
an old hospital for infectious diseases that must have dated from
about the time of the Famine, and Fitzgerald had got a small local
committee to take it over. The first couple of days in it gave me the
horrors, and it was weeks before I even began to see what Fitzgerald
meant by it all. Then I did begin to see that in spite of all the
drawbacks, it worked in a way bigger hospitals didn’t work, and it was
happy in a way that bigger hospitals are never happy. Everybody knew
everybody else, and everybody was madly curious about everybody else,
and if anybody ever gave a party, it wasn’t something devised by the
staff to entertain the patients; it was more likely to be the patients
entertaining the staff.

“Partly this was because Margaret Fitzgerald, the woman you met in
London, was the head nurse. I don’t know what she’s like now, and from
all I can hear, she’s a bit of a Tartar, but in those days she was a
pretty little thing with an air of being more efficient than anybody
ever was. Whenever you spoke to Margaret, she practically sprang to
attention and clicked her heels, and if you were misguided enough to
ask her for anything she hadn’t handy, she gave you a demonstration of
greyhound racing. And, of course, as you can see from the job she has
now, she was a damn great nurse.

“But mainly the place worked because of Fitzgerald and his colleagues,
the local doctors. Apart from him, none of them struck me as very
brilliant, though he himself had a real respect for an old doctor
called Pat Duane, a small, round, red-faced man with an old-fashioned
choker collar and a wonderful soupy bedside manner. Pat looked as
though some kind soul had let him to mature in a sherry cask till all
the crude alcohol was drawn out of him. But they were all
conscientious; they all listened to advice, even from me—and God knows
I hadn’t much to offer—and they all deferred in the most extraordinary
way to Fitzgerald. Dwyer had described him to me as a remarkable man,
and I was beginning to understand the full force of that, because I
knew Irish small towns the way only a country boy knows them, and if
those men weren’t at one another’s throats, fighting for every
five-bob fee that could be picked up, it was due to his influence. I
asked a doctor called MacCarthy about it one night and he invited me
in for a drink. MacCarthy was a tall old poseur with a terrible
passion for local history.

“‘Has it occurred to you that Fitzgerald may have given us back our
self-respect, young man?’ he asked in his pompous way.

“‘Our what?’ I asked in genuine surprise. In those days it hadn’t
occurred to me that a man could at the same time be a show-box and be
lacking in self-respect.

“‘Oh, come, O’Malley, come!’ he said, sounding like the last Duke of
Dooras. ‘As a medical man you are more observant than you pretend. I
presume you have met Dr. Duane?’

“‘I have. Yes,’ said I.

“‘And it didn’t occur to you that Dr. Duane was ever a victim of
alcohol?’ he went on portentously. ‘You understand, of course, that I
am not criticizing him. It isn’t easy for the professional man in
Ireland to maintain his standards of behavior. Fitzgerald has a
considerable respect for Dr. Duane’s judgment—quite justified, I may
add, quite justified. But at any rate, in a very short time Pat eased
off on the drink, and even began to read the medical journals
again. Now Fitzgerald has him in the hollow of his hand. We all like
to feel we are of some use to humanity—even the poor general
practitioner. ... But you saw it all for yourself, of course. You are
merely trying to pump a poor country doctor.’

“Fitzgerald was not pretentious. He liked me to drop in on him when I
had an hour to spare, and I went to his house every week for
dinner. He lived in an old, uncomfortable family house a couple of
miles out on the bay. Normally, he was cold, concentrated, and
irritable, but when he had a few drinks in he got melancholy, and this
for some reason caused him to be indiscreet and say dirty things about
his committee and even about the other doctors. ‘The most interesting
thing about MacCarthy,’ he said to me once, ‘is that he’s the seventh
son of a seventh son, and so he can diagnose a case without seeing the
patient at all. It leaves him a lot of spare time for local history.’
I suspected he made the same sort of dirty remarks about me, and that
secretly the man had no faith in anyone but himself. I told him so,
and I think he enjoyed it. Like all shy men he liked to be insulted in
a broad masculine way, and one night when I called him a flaming
egotist, he grunted like an old dog when you tickle him and said,
‘Drink makes you very offensive, O’Malley. Have some more!’

“It wasn’t so much that he was an egotist (though he was) as that he
had a pernickety sense of responsibility, and whenever he hadn’t a
case to worry over, he could always find some equivalent of a fatal
disease in the hospital—a porter who was too cheeky or a nurse who
made too free with the men patients—and he took it all personally and
on a very high level of suffering. He would sulk and snap at Margaret
for days over some trifle that didn't matter to anyone, and finally
reduce her to tears. At the same time, I suppose it was part of the
atmosphere of seriousness he had created about the makeshift hospital,
and it kept us all on our toes. Medicine was his life, and his gossip
was shop. Duane or MacCarthy or some other local doctor would drop in
of an evening to discuss a case—which by some process I never was able
to fathom had become Fitzgerald’s case—and over the drinks he would
grow gloomier and gloomier about our ignorance till at last, without a
word to any of us, he got up and telephoned some Dublin specialist he
knew. It was part of the man’s shyness that he only did it when he was
partly drunk and could pretend that instead of asking a favor he was
conferring one. Several times I watched that scene with amusement. It
was all carefully calculated, because if he hadn’t had enough to drink
he lacked the brass and became apologetic, whereas if he had had one
drink too much he could not describe what it was about the case that
really worried him. Not that he rated a specialist’s knowledge any
higher than ours, but it seemed the best he could do, and if that
didn’t satisfy him, he ordered the specialist down, even when it meant
footing the bill himself. It was only then I began to realize the
respect that Dublin specialists had for him, because Dwyer, who was a
terrified little man and hated to leave home for fear of what might
happen him in out-of-the-way places like Cork and Belfast, would only
give out a gentle moan about coming to Dooras. No wonder Duane and
MacCarthy swore by him, even if for so much of the time they, like
myself, thought him a nuisance.

“Margaret was a second edition of himself, though in her the sense of
responsibility conflicted with everything feminine in her till it
became a joke. She was small. She was pretty, with one of those
miniature faces that seem to have been reduced until every coarse line
has been refined in them. She moved at twice the normal speed and was
forever fussing and bossing and wheedling, till one of the nurses
would lose her temper and say, ‘Ah, Margaret, will you for God’s sake
give us time to breathe!’ That sort of impertinence would make Margaret
scowl, shrug, and go off somewhere else, but her sulks never lasted,
as her father’s did. The feminine side of her wouldn’t sustain them.

“I remember one night when all hell broke loose in the wards, as it
usually does in any hospital once a month. Half a dozen patients
desided to die all together, and I was called out of bed. Margaret and
the other nurse on night duty, Joan Henderson, had brewed themselves a
pot of tea in the kitchen, and they were scurrying round with a mug or
a bit of seedcake in their hands. I was giving an injection to one of
my patients, who should have been ready for discharge. In the next bed
was a dying old mountainy man who had nothing in particular wrong with
him except old age and a broken heart. I suddenly looked up from what
I was doing and saw he had come out of coma and was staring at
Margaret, who was standing at the other side of the bed from me,
nibbling the bit of cake over which she had been interrupted. She
started when she saw him staring at the cake, because she knew what
her father would say if ever he heard that she was eating in the
wards. Then she gave a broad grin and said in a country accent,
‘Johnny, would ’oo like a bit of seedcake?’ and held it to his
lips. He hesitated and then began to nibble, too, and then his tongue
came out and licked round his mouth, and somehow I knew he was
saved. “Tay, Johnny,’ she said mockingly. “Thot’s what ’oo wants now,
isn’t it?’ And that morning as I went through the wards, my own
patient was dead but old Johnny was sitting up, ready for another ten
years of the world’s hardship. That’s nursing.

“Margaret lived in such a pitch of nervous energy that every few weeks
she fell ill. ‘I keep telling that damn girl to take it easy,’ her
father would say with a scowl at me, but any time there was the least
indication that Margaret was taking it easy, he started to air his
sufferings with the anguish of an elephant. She was a girl with a real
sense of service, and at one time had tried to join a nursing order in
Africa, but dropped it because of his hatred for all nursing
orders. In itself this was funny, because Margaret was a liberal
Catholic who, like St. Teresa, was ‘for the Moors, and martyrdom’ but
never worried her head about human weaknesses and made no more of an
illegitimate baby than if she had them herself every Wednesday, while
he was an old-fashioned Catholic and full of obscure prejudices. At
the same time, he felt that the religious orders were leaving Ireland
without nurses—not that he thought so much of nurses!

“‘And I suppose nuns can’t be nurses?’ Margaret would ask with a
contemptuous shrug.

“‘How can they?’ he would say, in his shrillest voice. ‘The business of
religion is with the soul, not the body. My business is with the
body. When I’m done with it, the nuns can have it—or anyone else, for
that matter.’

“‘And why not the soul and the body?’ Margaret would ask in her
pertest tone.

“‘Because you can’t serve two masters, girl.’

“‘Pooh!’ Margaret would say with another shrug. ‘You can’t serve one
Siamese twin, either.’

“As often as I went to dinner in that house, there was hardly a meal
without an argument. Sometimes it was about no more than the amount of
whiskey he drank. Margaret hated drink, and watched every drop he
poured in his glass, so that often, just to spite her, he went on o
knock himself out. I used to think that she might have known her father
was a man who couldn’t resist a challenge. She was as censorisus as he
was, but she had a pertness and awkwardness that a man rarely has, and
suddenly, out of the blue, would come some piece of impertinence that
plunged him into gloom and made her cringe away to her bedroom, ready
for tears. He and I would go into the big front room, overlooking
Dooras Bay, and without a glance at the view he would splash enormous
tasheens of whiskey into our glasses, just to indicate how little he
cared for her, and say in a shrill, complaining voice, ‘I ruined that
girl, O’Malley. I know I did. If her mother was alive, she wouldn’t
talk to me that way.’

“Generally, they gave the impression of two people who hated one
another with a passionate intensity, but I knew well that he was crazy
about her. He always brought her back something from his trips to
Dublin or Cork and once when I was with him, he casually wasted my
whole afternoon looking for something nice for her. It never occurred
to him that I might have anything else to do. But he could also be
thoughtful; for once when for a full week he had been so intolerable
that I could scarcely bring myself to answer him he grinned and said,
‘I know exactly what you think of me, O’Malley. You think I’m an old
slave driver.’

“Not exactly,’ I said, giving him tit for tat. ‘Just an old whoor!

“At this, he gave a great gaffaw and handed me a silver cigarette case,
which I knew he must have bought for me in town the previous day, and
added sneeringly, ‘Now, don’t you be going round saying your work is
quite unappreciated.’

“Did I really say that?’ I asked, still keeping my end up, even though
there was something familiar about the sentiment.

“Or if you do, say it over the loudspeaker. Remember, O’Malley, I hear
_everything_.’ And the worst of it was, he did!

“Then, one night, when my year’s engagement was nearly ended, I went
to his house for dinner. That night there was no quarrelling, and he
and I sat on in the front room, drinking and admiring the view. I
should have known there was something wrong, because for once he didn’t
talk shop. He talked about almost everything else, and all the time he
was knocking back whiskey in a way I knew I could never keep pace
with. When it grew dark, he said with an air of surprise, ‘O’Malley,
I’m a bit tight. I think we’d better go for a stroll and clear our
heads.’

“We strolled up the avenue of rhododendrons to the gate and turned left
up the hill. It was a wild, rocky bit of country, stopped dead by
the roadway and then cascading merrily down the little fields to the
bay. There was still a coppery light in the sky, and the reflection of
a bonfire on one of the islands, like a pendulum, in the water. The
road fell again, between demesne walls and ruined gateways where the
last of the old gentry lived, and I was touched—partly, I suppose, by
all the whiskey, but partly by the place itself.

“‘I’ll regret this place when I leave it,’ I said.

“‘Oh, no, you won’t,’ he snapped back at me. ‘This is no place for
young people.’

“‘I fancy it might be a very pleasant memory if you were in the East
End of London,’ said I.

“‘It might,’ said Fitzgerald, ‘if you were quite sure you wouldn’t have
to go back to it. That’s what worries me about Margaret.’

“I had never noticed him worrying very much about Margaret or anyone
else, for that matter—so I took it as merely a matter of form.

“‘Margaret seems to do very well in it,’ I said.

“‘It’s no place for Margaret,’ he said sharply. ‘People need friends
of their own age and ideas old men like myself can’t supply. It’s
largely my fault for letting her come back here at all. I made this
place too much of my life, and that’s all right for a man, but it’s
not good enough for a high-spirited girl like that.’

“‘But doesn’t Margaret have friends here?’ I asked, trying to comfort
him.

“‘She has friends enough, but not of her own age,’ he said. ‘She’s too
mature for the girls here that are her own age. Not that I ever cared
much for her friends from Dublin,’ he added shortly. ‘They struck me
as a lot of show-boxes. I don’t like those intellectual Catholics,
talking to me about St. Thomas Aquinas. I never read St. Thomas
Aquinas, and from all I can hear I haven’t missed much. But young
people have to make their own mistakes. All the men around here seem
to want is some good-natured cow who’ll agree to everything they say,
and because she argues with them they think she’s pert and knowing.
Well, she is pert, and she is knowing—I realize that as well as
anybody. But there’s more than that to her. They’d have said the same
about me, only I proved to them that I knew what I was doing.’

“Suddenly I began to realize what he was saying, and I was frightened
out of my wits. I said to myself that it was impossible, that a man
like Fitzgerald could never mean a thing like that, but at the same
time I felt that he did mean it, and that it had been in his mind from
the first night he met me. I muttered something about her having more
chances in Dublin.

“‘That’s the trouble,’ he said. ‘She didn’t know what she was letting
herself in for when she came back here, and no more did I. Now she
won’t leave, because I’d be here on my own, and I know I wouldn’t like
it, but still I have my work to do, and for a man that’s enough. I like
pitting my wits against parish priests and county councillors and
nuns. Besides, when you reach my age you realize that you could have
worse, and they’ll let me have my own way for the time I have left
me. But I haven’t so long to live, and when I die, they’ll have some
champion footballer running the place, and Margaret will be taking
orders from the nuns. She thinks now that she won’t mind, but she won’t
do it for long. I know the girl. She ought to marry, and then she’d
have to go wherever her husband took her.’

“But you don’t really think the hospital will go to pieces like that?’
I asked, pretending to be deeply concerned but really only trying to
head Fitzgerald off the subject he seemed to have on his mind. ‘I
mean, don’t you think Duane and MacCarthy will hold it together?’

“‘How can they?’ he asked querulously. ‘It’s not their life, the way
it’s been mine. I don’t mean they won’t do their best, but the place
will go to pieces just the same. It’s a queer feeling, Dermot, when you
come to the end of your time and realize that nothing in the world
outlasts the man that made it.’

“That sentence was almost snapped at me, out of the side of his mouth,
and yet it sounded like a cry of pain—maybe because he’d used my
Christian name for the first time. He was not a man to use Chrisian
names. I didn’t know what to say.

“‘Of course, I should have had a son to pass on my responsibilities
to,’ he added wonderingly. ‘I’m not any good with girls. I dare say
that was why I liked you, the first time we met—because I might have
had a son like you.’

“Then I couldn’t bear it any longer, and it broke from me. ‘And it
wasn’t all on one side!’

“‘I guessed that. In certain ways we’re not so unlike. And that’s what
I really wanted to say to you before you go. If ever you and Margaret
got to care for one another, it would mean a lot to me. She won’t have
much, but she’ll never be a burden on anybody, and if ever she marries,
she’ll make a good wife.’

“It was the most embarrassing moment of my life—and mind, it wasn’t
embarrassing just because I was being asked to marry a nice girl I’d
never given a thought to. I’m a country boy, and I knew all about
‘made’ matches by the time I was seventeen, and I never had anything
but contempt for the snobs that pretend to despise them. Damn good
matches the most of them are, and a thousand times better than the
sort you see nowadays that seem to be made up out of novelettes or
moving pictures! Still and all, it’s different when it comes to your
own turn. I suppose it’s only at a moment like that you realize you’re
just as silly as any little servant girl. But it wasn’t only that. It
was because I was being proposed to by a great man, a fellow I’d
looked up to in a way I never looked up to my own father, and I
couldn’t do the little thing he wanted me to do. I muttered some
nonsense about never having been able to think about marriage—as if
there ever was a young fellow that hadn’t thought about it every night
in his life!—and he saw how upset I was and squeezed my arm.

“‘What did I tell you?’ he said. ‘I knew I was drunk, and if she ever
gets to hear what I said to you, she’ll cut me in little bits.’

“And that tone of his broke my heart. I don’t even know if you’ll
understand what I mean, but all I felt was grief to think a great man
who’d brought life to a place where life never was before would have
to ask a favor of me, and me not to be able to grant it. Because all
the time I wanted to be cool and suave and say of course I’d marry his
daughter, just to show the way I felt about himself, and I was too
much of a coward to do it. In one way, it seemed so impossible, and in
another it seemed such a small thing.

“Of course, we never resumed the conversation, but that didn’t make it
any easier, because it wasn’t only between myself and him; it was
between me and Margaret. The moment I had time to think of it, I knew
Fitzgerald was too much a gentleman to have said anything to me
without first making sure that she’d have me.

“Well, you know the rest yourself. When he died, things happened
exactly the way he’d prophesied; a local footballer got his job, and
the nuns took over the nursing, and there isn’t a Dublin doctor under
fifty that could even tell you where Dooras is. Fitzgerald was
right. Nothing in the world outlasts a man. Margaret, of course, has a
great reputation, and I’m told on the best authority that there isn’t
a doctor in St. Dorothy’s she hasn’t put the fear of God into so I
suppose it’s just as well that she never got the opportunity to put it
into me. Or don’t you agree?”

I didn’t, of course, as O’Malley well knew. Anyway, he could hardly
have done much worse for himself. And I had met Margaret, and I had
seen her autocratic airs, but they hadn’t disturbed me much. She was
just doing it on temperament, rather than technique—a very Irish way,
and probably not so unlike her father’s. I knew I didn’t have to tell
O’Malley that. He was a gentleman himself, and his only reason for
telling me the story was that already, with the wisdom that comes of
age, he had begun to wonder whether he had not missed something in
missing Margaret Fitzgerald. I knew that he had.



149
(1958)
Source: Collected Stories, 1981