Free Collected Stories by Frank O'Connor Page A

there in your line, I’m afraid,” said Devine with his maddeningly respectful, deprecating air, as if he put the parish priest’s tastes on a level with his own.
    â€œâ€™Tisn’t that,” said Whelan in a hollow faraway voice, “but I see you have a lot of foreign books. I suppose you know the languages well.”
    â€œWell enough to read,” Devine said wearily, his handsome head on one side. “Why?”
    â€œThat foreign boat at the jetties,” Whelan said without looking round. “What is it? French or German? There’s terrible scandal about it.”
    â€œIs that so?” drawled Devine, his dark eyebrows going up his narrow, slanting forehead. “I didn’t hear.”
    â€œTerrible,” Whelan said mournfully, turning on him the full battery of his round, rosy old face and shining spectacles. “There’s girls on it every night. I told Sullivan I’d go round tonight and give them the hunt. It occurred to me we might want someone to speak the language.”
    â€œI’m afraid my French would hardly rise to that,” Devine said dryly, but he made no other objection, for, except for his old-womanly fits of virtue, Whelan was all right as parish priests go. Devine had had sad experience of how they could go. He put on his faded old coat and clamped his battered hat down over his pince-nez, and the two priests went down the Main Street to the post-office corner. It was deserted but for two out-of-works supporting either side of the door like ornaments, and a few others hanging hypnotized over the bridge while they studied the foaming waters of the weir. Devine had taken up carpentry himself in order to lure them into the technical classes, but it hadn’t worked too well.
    â€œThe dear knows,” he said thoughtfully, “you’d hardly wonder where those girls would go.”
    â€œAh,” said the parish priest, holding his head as though it were a flowerpot that might fall and break, “what do they want to go anywhere for? They’re mad on pleasure. That girl Nora Fitzpatrick is one of them, and her mother at home dying.”
    â€œThat might be her reason,” said Devine, who visited the Fitzpatricks and knew what their home was like, with six children, and a mother dying of cancer.
    â€œAh, the girl’s place is at home,” said Whelan without rancor.
    They went down past the technical school to the quays, these, too, deserted but for a coal boat and the big foreign grain boat, rising high and dark above the edge of the quay on a full tide. The town was historically reputed to have been a great place—well, about a hundred years ago—and had masses of gray stone warehouses, all staring with sightless eyes across the river. Two men who had been standing against the wall, looking up at the grain boat, came to join them. One was a tall, gaunt man with a long, sour, melancholy face which looked particularly hideous because it sported a youthful pink and white complexion and looked exactly like the face of an old hag, heavily made up. He wore a wig and carried a rolled-up umbrella behind his back. His name was Sullivan; he was the manager of a shop in town, and was forever in and out of the church. Devine hated him. The other, Joe Sheridan, was a small, fat, Jewish-looking man with dark skin and an excitable manner. Devine didn’t dislike him so much. He was merely the inevitable local windbag, who got drunk on his own self-importance. As the four men met, Devine looked up and saw two young foreign faces, propped on their hands, peering at them over the edge of the boat.
    â€œWell, boys?” asked Whelan.
    â€œThere’s two aboard at present, father,” Sullivan said in a shrill scolding voice. “Nora Fitzpatrick and Phillie O’Malley.”
    â€œWell, you’d better go aboard and tell them come off,” Whelan said tranquilly.
    â€œI wonder what our legal position is,