Collected Stories

Two More Gallants

You will not, I believe, find either Lenehan or Corley still parading the streets of Dublin, but often in the early evening a man called Heffernan may be found raising a glass of Paddy in Toner’s public house; and FitzPatrick, on his bicycle, every working day makes the journey across the city, from Ranelagh to the offices of McGibbon, Tait & FitzPatrick, solicitors and commissioners for oaths. It is on his doctor’s advice that he employs this mode of transport. It is against the advice of his that Heffernan continues to indulge himself in Toner’s. The two men no longer know one another. They do not meet and, in order to avoid a confrontation, each has been known to cross a street.

Thirty or so years ago, when I first knew Heffernan and FitzPatrick, the relationship was different. The pair were closely attached, Heffernan the mentor, FitzPatrick ready with a laugh. All three of us were students, but Heffernan, a Kilkenny man, was different in the sense that he had been a student for as long as anyone could remember. The College porters said they recalled his presence over fifteen years and, though given to exaggeration, they may well have been accurate in that: certainly Heffernan was well over thirty, a small ferrety man, swift to take offence.

FitzPatrick was bigger and more amiable. An easy smile perpetually creased the bland ham of his face, causing people to believe, quite incorrectly, that he was stupid. His mouse-coloured hair was kept short enough not to require a parting, his eyes reflected so profound a degree of laziness that people occasionally professed surprise to find them open. Heffernan favoured pin-striped suits, FitzPatrick a commodious blue blazer. They drank in Kehoe’s in Anne Street.

‘He is one of those chancers,’ Heffernan said, ‘we could do without.’

‘Oh, a right old bollocks,’ agreed FitzPatrick.

‘ “Well, Mr Heffernan,” ’ he says, ‘ “I see you are still with us.” ’

‘As though you might be dead.’

‘If he had his way.’

In the snug of Kehoe’s they spoke of Heffernan’s bête noire, the aged Professor Flacks, a man from the North of Ireland.

‘ “I see you are still with us,” ‘ Heffernan repeated. ‘Did you ever hear the beat of that?’

‘Sure, Flacks is senile.’

‘The mots in the lecture giggle when he says it.’

‘Oh, an ignorant bloody crowd.’

Heffernan became meditative. Slowly he lit a Sweet Afton. He was supported in his continuing studentship by the legacy left to him for that purpose by an uncle in Kilkenny, funds which would cease when he was a student no longer. He kept that tragedy at bay by regularly failing the Littlego examination, a test of proficiency in general studies to which all students were obliged to submit themselves.

‘A fellow came up to me this morning,’ he said now, ‘a right eejit from Monasterevin. Was I looking for grinds in Little-go Logic? Five shillings an hour.’

FitzPatrick laughed. He lifted his glass of stout and drank from it, imposing on his upper lip a moustache of foam which was permitted to remain there.

‘A minion of Flacks’,’ Heffernan continued. ‘A Flacks boy and no mistake, I said to myself.’

‘You can tell them a mile off.’

‘ “I know your father,” I said to him. “Doesn’t he deliver milk?” Well, he went the colour of a sunset. “Avoid conversation with Flacks,” I told him. “He drove a wife and two sisters insane.” ’

‘Did your man say anything?’

‘Nothing, only “Gripes”,’

‘Oh, Flacks is definitely peculiar,’ FitzPatrick agreed.

In point of fact, at that time FitzPatrick had never met Professor Flacks. It was his laziness that caused him to converse in a manner which suggested he had, and it was his laziness also which prevented him from noticing the intensity of Heffernan’s grievance. Heffernan hated Professor Flacks with a fervour, but in his vague and unquestioning way FitzPatrick assumed that the old professor was no more than a passing thorn in his friend’s flesh, a nuisance that could be exorcised by means of complaint and abuse. Heffernan’s pride did not at that time appear to play a part; and FitzPatrick, who knew his friend as well as anyone did, would not have designated him as a possessor of that quality to an unusual degree. The opposite was rather implied by the nature of his upkeep and his efforts not to succeed in the Littlego examination. But pride, since its presence might indeed be questioned by these facts, came to its own support: when the story is told in Dublin today it is never forgotten that it has roots in Professor Flacks’s causing girls to giggle because he repeatedly made a joke at Heffernan’s expense.

Employed by the University to instruct in certain aspects of literature, Professor Flacks concentrated his attention on the writings of James Joyce. Shakespeare, Tennyson, Shelley, Coleridge, Wilde, Swift, Dickens, Eliot, Trollope, and many another familiar name were all bundled away in favour of a Joycean scholarship that thirty or so years ago was second to none in Irish university life. Professor Flacks could tell you whom Joyce had described as a terrified YMCA man, and the date of the day on which he had written that his soul was full of decayed ambitions. He spoke knowledgeably of the stale smell of incense, like foul flowerwater; and of flushed eaves and stubble geese.

‘Inane bloody show-off,’ Heffernan said nastily in Kehoe’s.

‘You’ll see him out, Heff.’

‘A bogs like that would last for ever.’

Twelve months later, after he and Heffernan had parted company, FitzPatrick repeated all that to me. I didn’t know either of them well, but was curious because a notable friendship had so abruptly come to an end. FitzPatrick, on his own, was inclined to talk to anyone.

We sat in College Park, watching the cricket while he endeavoured to remember the order of subsequent events. It was Heffernan who’d had the idea, as naturally it would be, since FitzPatrick still knew Professor Flacks only by repute and had not suffered the sarcasm which Heffernan found so offensive. But FitzPatrick played a vital part in the events which followed, because the elderly woman who played the main part of all was a general maid in FitzPatrick’s digs.

‘Has that one her slates on?’ Heffernan inquired one night as they passed her by in the hall.

‘Ah, she’s only a bit quiet.’

‘She has a docile expression all right.’

‘She wouldn’t damage a fly.’

Soon after that Heffernan took to calling in at FitzPatrick’s digs in Donnybrook more often than he had in the past. Sometimes he was there when FitzPatrick arrived back in the evening, sitting in the kitchen while the elderly maid pricked sausages or cut up bread for the meal that would shortly be served. Mrs Maginn, the landlady, liked to lie down for a while at that time of day, so Heffernan and the maid had the kitchen to themselves. But finding him present on several occasions when she came downstairs, Mrs Maginn in passing mentioned the fact to her lodger. FitzPatrick, who didn’t himself understand what Heffernan’s interest in the general maid was, replied that his friend liked to await his return in the kitchen because it was warm. Being an easy-going woman, Mrs Maginn was appeased.

‘There’s no doubt in my mind at all,’ Heffernan stated in Kehoe’s after a few weeks of this behaviour. ‘If old Flacks could hear it he’d have a tortoise’s pup.’

FitzPatrick wagged his head, knowing that an explanation was in the air. Heffernan said: ‘She’s an interesting old lassie.’

He then told FitzPatrick a story which FitzPatrick had never heard before. It concerned a man called Corley who had persuaded a maid in a house in Baggot Street to do a small service for him. It concerned, as well, Corley’s friend, Lenehan, who was something of a wit. At first FitzPatrick was confused by the story, imagining it to be about a couple of fellow-students whom he couldn’t place.

‘The pen of Jimmy Joyce,’ Heffernan explained. ‘That yarn is Flacks’s favourite of the lot.’

‘Well, I’d say there wasn’t much to it. Sure, a skivvy never would.’

‘She was gone on Corley.’

‘But would she steal for him?’

‘You’re no romantic, Fitz.’

FitzPatrick laughed, agreeable to accepting this opinion. Then, to his astonishment, Heffernan said: ‘It’s the same skivvy Mrs Maginn has above in your digs.’

FitzPatrick shook his head. He told Heffernan to go on with himself, but Heffernan insisted.

‘She told me the full story herself one night I was waiting for you –maybe the first night I ever addressed a word to her. “Come into the kitchen outa the cold, Mr Heffernan,” she says. D’you remember the occasion it was? Late after tea, and you didn’t turn up at all. She fried me an egg.’

‘But, holy Christ, man –’

‘It was the same night you did well with the nurse from Dundrum.’

FitzPatrick guffawed. A great girl, he said. He repeated a few details, but Heffernan didn’t seem interested.

‘I was told the whole works in the kitchen, like Jimmy Joyce had it out of her when she was still in her teens. A little gold sovereign was what she fecked for your man.’

‘But the poor old creature is as honest as the day’s long.’

‘Oh, she took it all right and she still thinks Corley was top of the bill.’

‘But Corley never existed –’

‘Of course he did. Wasn’t he for ever entertaining that fine little tart with the witticisms of Master Lenehan?’

The next thing that happened, according to FitzPatrick, was that a bizarre meeting took place. Heffernan approached Professor Flacks with the information that the model for the ill-used girl in Joyce’s story ‘Two Gallants’ had come to light in a house in Donnybrook. The Professor displayed considerable excitement, and on a night when Mrs Maginn was safely at the pictures he was met by Heffernan at the bus stop and led to the kitchen.

He was a frail man in a tweed suit, not at all as FitzPatrick had imagined him. Mrs Maginn’s servant, a woman of about the same age, was slightly deaf and moved slowly owing to rheumatism. Heffernan had bought half a pound of fig-roll biscuits which he arranged on a plate. The old woman poured tea.

Professor Flacks plied her with questions. He asked them gently, with courtesy and diplomacy, without any hint of the tetchiness described so often by Heffernan. It was a polite occasion in the kitchen, Heffernan handing round the fig-rolls, the maid appearing to delight in recalling a romance in her past.

‘And later you told Mr Joyce about this?’ prompted Professor Flacks.

‘He used come to the house when I worked in North Frederick Street, sir. A dentist by the name of O’Riordan.’

‘Mr Joyce came to get his teeth done?’

‘He did, sir.’

‘And you’d talk to him in the waiting-room, is that it?’

‘I’d be lonesome, sir. I’d open the hall door when the bell rang and then there’d be a wait for maybe an hour before it’d ring again, sir. I recollect Mr Joyce well, sir.’

‘He was interested in your – ah – association with the fellow you mentioned, was he?’

‘It was only just after happening, sir. I was turned out of the place in Baggot Street on account of the bit of trouble. I was upset at the time I knew Mr Joyce, sir.’

‘That’s most understandable.’

‘I’d often tell a patient what had happened to me.’

‘But you’ve no hard feelings today? You were badly used by the fellow, yet –’

‘Ah, it’s long ago now, sir.’

Heffernan and FitzPatrick saw the Professor on to a bus and, according to FitzPatrick, he was quivering with pleasure. He clambered into a seat, delightedly talking to himself, not noticing when they waved from the pavement. They entered a convenient public house and ordered pints of stout.

‘Did you put her up to it?’ FitzPatrick inquired.

‘The thing about that one, she’d do anything for a scrap of the ready. Didn’t you ever notice that about her? She’s a right old miser.’

It was that that Heffernan had recognized when first he’d paid a visit to Mrs Maginn’s kitchen: the old maid was possessed of a meanness that had become obsessional with her. She spent no money whatsoever, and was clearly keen to add to what she had greedily accumulated. He had paid her a pound to repeat the story he had instructed her in.

‘Didn’t she say it well? Oh, top of the bill, I’d say she was.’

‘You’d be sorry for old Flacks.’

‘Oh, the devil take bloody Mr Flacks.’

Some months went by. Heffernan no longer visited the kitchen in Donnybrook, and he spoke hardly at all of Professor Flacks. In his lazy way FitzPatrick assumed that the falsehoods which had been perpetrated were the be-all and end-all of the affair, that Heffernan’s pride – now clearly revealed to him – had somehow been satisfied. But then, one summer’s afternoon while the two idled in Stephen’s Green in the hope of picking up girls, Heffernan said: ‘There’s a thing on we might go to next Friday.’

‘What’s that?’

‘Mr Flacks performing. The Society of the Friends of James Joyce.’

It was a public lecture, one of several that were to be delivered during a week devoted by the Society to the life and work of the author who was its raison d’être. The Society’s members came from far afield: from the United States, Germany, Finland, Italy, Australia, France, England and Turkey. Learned academics mingled with less learned enthusiasts. Mr James Duffy’s Chapelizod was visited, and Mr Power’s Dublin Castle. Capel Street and Ely Place were investigated, visits were made to the renowned Martello Tower, to Howth and to Pim’s. Betty Bellezza was mentioned, and Val from Skibbereen. The talk was all Joyce talk. For a lively week Joyce reigned in Dublin.

On the appointed evening FitzPatrick accompanied his friend to Professor Flacks’s lecture, his premonitions suggesting that the occasion was certain to be tedious. He had no idea what Heffernan was up to, and wasn’t prepared to devote energy to speculating. With a bit of luck, he hoped, he’d be able to have a sleep.

Before the main event a woman from the University of Washington spoke briefly about Joyce’s use of misprints; a bearded German read a version of ‘The Holy Office’ that had only recently been discovered. Then the tweeded figure of Professor Flacks rose. He sipped at a tumbler of water, and spoke for almost an hour about the model for the servant girl in the story, ‘Two Gallants’. His discovery of that same elderly servant, now employed in a house in Donnybrook, engendered in his audience a whisper of excitement that remained alive while he spoke, and exploded into applause when he finished. A light flush enlivened the paleness of his face as he sat down. It was, as Heffernan remarked to his dozy companion, the old man’s finest hour.

It was then that FitzPatrick first became uneasy. The packed lecture-hall had accepted as fact all that had been stated, yet none of it was true. Notes had been taken, questions were now being asked. A voice just behind the two students exclaimed that this remarkable discovery was worth coming two thousand miles to hear about. Mental pictures of James Joyce in a dentist’s waiting-room flashed about the hall. North Frederick Street would be visited tomorrow, if not tonight.

‘I’d only like to ask,’ Heffernan shouted above the hubbub, ‘if I may, a simple little question.’ He was on his feet. He had caught the attention of Professor Flacks, who was smiling benignly at him. ‘I’d only like to inquire,’ Heffernan continued, ‘if that whole thing couldn’t be a lot of baloney.’

‘Baloney?’ a foreign voice repeated.

‘Baloney?’ said Professor Flacks.

The buzz of interest hadn’t died down. Nobody was much interested in the questions that were being asked except the people who were asking them. A woman near to FitzPatrick said it was extraordinarily moving that the ill-used servant girl, who had been so tellingly presented as an off-stage character by Joyce, should bear no grudge all these years later.

‘What I mean, Professor Flacks,’ said Heffernan, ‘is I don’t think James Joyce ever attended a dentist in North Frederick Street. What I’m suggesting to you, sir, is that the source of your information was only looking for a bit of limelight.’

FitzPatrick later described to me the expression that entered Professor Flacks’s eyes. ‘A lost kind of look,’ he said, ‘as though someone had poked the living daylights out of him.’ The old man stared at Heffernan, frowning, not comprehending at first. His relationship with this student had been quite different since the night of the visit to Mrs Maginn’s kitchen: it had been distinguished by a new friendliness, and what had seemed like mutual respect.

‘Professor Flacks and myself,’ continued Heffernan, ‘heard the old lady together. Only I formed the impression that she was making the entire matter up. I thought, sir, you’d formed that opinion also.’

‘Oh, but surely now, Mr Heffernan, the woman wouldn’t do that.’

‘There was never a dentist by the name of O’Riordan that practised in North Frederick Street, sir. That’s a fact that can easily be checked.’

Heffernan sat down. An uneasy silence gripped the lecture-hall. Eyes turned upon Professor Flacks. Weakly, with a hoarseness in his voice, he said: ‘But why, Mr Heffernan, would she have made all that up? A woman of that class would hardly have read the story, she’d hardly have known –’

‘It’s an unfortunate thing, sir,’ interrupted Heffernan, standing up again, ‘but that old one would do anything for a single pound note. She’s of a miserly nature. I think what has happened,’ He went on, his tone changing as he addressed the assembly, ‘is that a student the Professor failed in an examination took a chance to get his own back. Our friend Jas Joyce,’ he added, ‘would definitely have relished that.’

In misery Professor Flacks lifted the tumbler of water to his lips, his eyes cast down. You could sense him thinking, FitzPatrick reported, that he was a fool and he had been shown to be a fool. You could sense him thinking that he suddenly appeared to be unreliable, asinine and ridiculous. In front of the people who mattered to him most of all he had been exposed as a fraud he did not feel himself to be. Never again could he hold his head up among the Friends of James Joyce. Within twenty-four hours his students would know what had occurred.

An embarrassed shuffling broke out in the lecture-hall. People murmured and began to make their way into the aisles. FitzPatrick recalled the occasion in Mrs Maginn’s kitchen, the two elderly puppets on the end of Heffernan’s string, the fig-rolls and the tea. He recalled the maid’s voice retailing the story that he, because he knew Heffernan so well, had doubted with each word that was uttered. He felt guilty that he hadn’t sought the old man out and told him it wasn’t true. He glanced through the throng in the lecture-hall at the lone figure in porridgy tweeds, and unhappily reflected that suicide had been known to follow such wretched disgrace. Outside the lecture-hall he told Heffernan to go to hell when a drink in Anne Street was suggested – a remark for which Heffernan never forgave him.

‘I mean,’ FitzPatrick said as we sat in College Park a long time later, ‘how could anyone be as petty? When all the poor old fellow ever said to him was “I see you are still with us?” ’

I made some kind of reply. Professor Flacks had died a natural death a year after the delivery of his lecture on ‘Two Gallants’. Earlier in his life he had not, as Heffernan had claimed, driven a wife and two sisters mad: he’d been an only child, the obituary said in the Irish Times, and a bachelor. It was an awkward kind of obituary, for the gaffe he’d made had become quite famous and was still fresh in Dubliners’ minds.

We went on talking about him, FitzPatrick and I, as we watched the cricket in College Park. We spoke of his playful sarcasm and how so vehemently it had affected Heffernan’s pride. We marvelled over the love that had caused a girl in a story to steal, and over the miserliness that had persuaded an old woman to be party to a trick. FitzPatrick touched upon his own inordinate laziness, finding a place for that also in our cobweb of human frailty.