The young lady changed the position of one of the
vases and went back to the two young men. They
began to talk of the same subject. Once or twice
the young lady glanced at me over her shoulder.
I lingered before her stall, though I knew my stay
was useless, to make my interest in her wares seem
the more real. Then I turned away slowly and
walked down the middle of the bazaar. I allowed
the two pennies to fall against the sixpence in my
pocket. I heard a voice call from one end of
the gallery that the light was out. The upper
part of the hall was now completely dark.
Gazing up into the darkness I saw myself as a creature
driven and derided by vanity; and my eyes burned with
anguish and anger.
She sat at the window watching the evening invade
the avenue. Her head was leaned against the window
curtains and in her nostrils was the odour of dusty
cretonne. She was tired.
Few people passed. The man out of the last house
passed on his way home; she heard his footsteps clacking
along the concrete pavement and afterwards crunching
on the cinder path before the new red houses.
One time there used to be a field there in which they
used to play every evening with other people’s
children. Then a man from Belfast bought the
field and built houses in it—not like their
little brown houses but bright brick houses with shining
roofs. The children of the avenue used to play
together in that field —the Devines, the
Waters, the Dunns, little Keogh the cripple, she and
her brothers and sisters. Ernest, however, never
played: he was too grown up. Her father
used often to hunt them in out of the field with his
blackthorn stick; but usually little Keogh used to
keep nix and call out when he saw her father coming.
Still they seemed to have been rather happy then.
Her father was not so bad then; and besides, her mother
was alive. That was a long time ago; she and
her brothers and sisters were all grown up her mother
was dead. Tizzie Dunn was dead, too, and the
Waters had gone back to England. Everything changes.
Now she was going to go away like the others, to leave
her home.
Home! She looked round the room, reviewing all
its familiar objects which she had dusted once a week
for so many years, wondering where on earth all the
dust came from. Perhaps she would never see again
those familiar objects from which she had never dreamed
of being divided. And yet during all those years
she had never found out the name of the priest whose
yellowing photograph hung on the wall above the broken
harmonium beside the coloured print of the promises
made to Blessed Margaret Mary Alacoque. He had
been a school friend of her father. Whenever he
showed the photograph to a visitor her father used
to pass it with a casual word:
“He is in Melbourne now.”
