Then she looked up and saw me. There was a sudden flash of recognition in her glance, and I knew that, after all, my first impression was the right one.
"That gown," I said "would not be at all suitable for going to catch lobsters in."
It was a flimsy affair, with gold beads on it, and a kind of outer skin of very transparent material called, I believe, chiffon. Onnie and her attendant saleswoman both spoke at once in reply to my criticism.
"It would not!" said Onnie. "I'd be sorry for the one who was fool enough to try for a lobster at Carrigwee with a dress the like of that on her!"
This time her voice had the true Connaught intonation. She framed her sentences as all good Connaught girls should. She also grinned. Grin is, of course, a wrong word to use about a stately lady; but I run the risk of using it because her mouth took on the same expression exactly that Onnie Dever's wore when she stood on the shore and watched me run my boat aground.
The assistant saleswoman neither grinned nor smiled—she sniffed.
"This is a dinner dress," she said; "but if madam wants a golfing costume we have some rough tweeds——"
It is not easy to guess why the mention of the lobster should have suggested golf to this damsel's mind. The word sport no doubt covers many things, and golf among them; but it can hardly be stretched to include the dragging of lobsters out of rocky holes along the shore.
She was never allowed to explain what her idea was. Miss Honoria Dever glanced at her. Without saying another word, without hearing one, the girl laid the dinner dress down on the chair and faded away. Such is the discipline maintained by the competent head of a department in a great store.
Then Onnie Dever Tom, no longer Honoria, turned to me with a flood of questions. I had to tell her a hundred intimate details about men and things—how this one was dead and that one married; how one cottage, known to both of us, was thatched last summer, and another had a new door; what boats caught mackerel, what hookers brought loads of winter fuel. For nearly an hour the business of selling ladies' dresses in that store was either held up or conducted without the knowledge of the head of the department.
When Onnie had finished her questions, I began mine, and I heard a very interesting story. It began with the adventures of a girl who did odd jobs of sewing for a man who specialised in the manufacture of cheap shirt waists. It went on with an account of the struggles of a junior assistant taken on one Christmastime to assist at the "notions" counter. It reached at last the daily life of Miss Honoria Dever, head of the costume department, responsible for the fashion of the clothes of half of the smartest women in the city—leader and commander of a regiment of some thirty young women, all bound to sell, to fit, to advise, to sew—even, I imagine, to dress as Miss Honoria bade them.
She told me the salary she earned; and I, dividing her dollars by five, assured her that no man who lived anywhere round the shores of our bay—not the doctor; not the lawyer; not the priest—was earning so much as she was. Then she confided to me that she had not reached yet the end of her career. There were heights to be climbed.
There are buyers who visit New York in the season when the form and colour of clothes are decided on by the ultimate, remote authorities who settle these things. There are buyers who go out from New York itself to London and Paris, crossing the Atlantic once or twice a year, who, by virtue of some strange instinct for raiment, can be trusted to guess in December what fabrics American women will want to buy in May.
Some day Miss Honoria will do this work—will, I feel tolerably certain, be at the very head of the elect corps of those who do it; will guess more brilliantly than the others; will buy with more infallible certainty that what she buys will be sold again.
Here I am left wondering! If Onnie Dever had remained at home she would, in the ordinary course of time, have married. In some tiny windswept cabin on an island she would have ministered to the wants of a man who returned to her day after day, wet and weary from toiling on the sea. She herself would have toiled, sometimes standing knee-deep in water beside a stranded boat while the creel on her back was filled with turf.
She would have staggered under her burden up the stony beach time after time, until the autumn darkness closed round her, and built her stack of fuel against the coming of the winter days. She would have baked great brown-crusted loaves in pot ovens. She would have dragged scanty milk from the udders of lean cows. She would have cleaned and salted the fish her husband caught and hung them in the reek of the fire's smoke to dry. She would have patched shirts and trousers painfully until patch was joined to patch and the original fabric was no more than a memory. She would have gone barefooted, with splayed, misshapen feet, down among the boulders of the upper beach to bring water from a brackish well.
She would have lost the fresh beauty of girlhood very speedily and ceased after a little while to care greatly that her hands were rough, her face weather-beaten and her figure ungainly. The other life, the one she has chosen, is better than that.
And yet I wonder! Onnie would have borne children. Year after year, for many years perhaps, a fresh baby would have ousted the old one from its cradle. Boys and girls would have clung about her skirts and clamoured in her ears. Slapped and kissed, scolded and caressed, they would have been a plague and a joy to her. She would have watched them grow to be men and women brave and strong. She would have known that life, the great insistent need of the universe, was going forth from her.
Which, after all, is best? Which achievement gives most satisfaction to look back on after all is over. I said good-bye to Onnie—still wondering.
IV.—SAINTS AND SCHOLARS
I
VERY soon after her husband's death, things began to go wrong with Mrs. Flanagan. She had "a long, weak family," which was against her. Eight children she had, and the six eldest of them were girls, who were little good on the land. Labouring men were expensive to hire, and impossible to get when they were most wanted. Cattle sickened and died mysteriously. The old mare got feeble; the young mare broke her leg in a bog-hole. Year after year the pigs brought no price, and feeding stuff was dear. For five years the widow struggled on in an incompetent manner against impossible circumstances. Then she collapsed.
She owed four years' rent to the agent, and she owed a sum which did not bear thinking of to Patrick Sweeny, Mr. Patrick Sweeny, Esq., J.P., D.C., who kept the shop. The statement of the amount of this debt brought a weakness on Mrs. Flanagan when it arrived by post, a weakness from which she did not rally for more than a week. It was impossible to believe that the Indian meal, on which she fed her children and her chickens, the occasional lock of seed potatoes, the bag or two of patent fertiliser, the grain of tea, could have cost the monstrous sum which faced her at the foot of the bill. It was true that she had paid Mr. Patrick Sweeny no actual cash for nearly three years; but she had brought him eggs, pounds of butter, geese in the autumn, chickens in the spring; she had given her eldest daughter to his service, and twice he had bought young heifers from her. She had not investigated the condition of her account, but she believed in a vague way that things must be pretty even between her and Mr. Patrick Sweeny. The sudden disclosure of the real condition of affairs brought on the weakness.
She rallied to discover that she was going to be evicted. On the whole, she received the news with a sense of relief. Her farm was a good one, held at a judicial rent. The tenant's interest would sell for a respectable sum. The agent's claim would be satisfied, Mr. Patrick Sweeny's bill settled, and she would have enough left to pay her way to America. There, no doubt, the girls would get something to do. Anyway, she would have a little money in her pocket, and "Sure, God is good."