Mary, Mary Part 1

Mary, Mary.

by James Stephens.

INTRODUCTION

If any of James Stephens' books might be thought to have need of an Introduction it would be the delightful story that is called "Mary, Mary" on one side of the Atlantic Ocean and "The Charwoman's Daughter"

on the other. It was written in 1910, when the author was known as the poet of "Insurrections" and the writer of a few of the mordant studies that belong to a later book, "Here Are Ladies."

In 1911 four people came together to establish "The Irish Review."

They were David Houston, Thomas MacDonagh, James Stephens and the present writer. James Stephens mentioned that he could hand over some stuff for publication. The "stuff" was the book in hand. It came out as a serial in the second number with the t.i.tle "Mary, A Story," ran for a twelvemonth and did much to make the fortune (if a review that perished after a career of four years ever had its fortune made) of "The Irish Review."

From the publication of its first chapters the appeal of "Mary"

was felt in two or three countries. Mary Makebelieve was not just a fictional heroine--she was Cinderella and Snow-white and all the maidens of tradition for whom the name of heroine is big and burthensome. With the first words of the story James Stephens put us into the att.i.tude of listeners to the household tale of folk-lore.

"Mary, Mary" is the simplest of stories: a girl sees this and that, meets a Great Creature who makes advances to her, is humiliated, finds a young champion and comes into her fortune--that is all there is to it as a story. But is it not enough to go with Mary to Stephens'

Green and watch the young ducks "pick up nothing with the greatest eagerness and swallow it with the greatest delight," and after that to notice that the ring priced One Hundred Pounds has been taken from the Jewellers' window, and then stand outside the theatre with her and her mother and make up with them the story of the plays from the pictures on the posters?--plays of mystery and imagination they must have surely been.

Then, of course, there is always Mary's mother; and Mrs. Makebelieve, with her beaked nose, and her eyes like pools of ink, and her eagle-flights of speech would give a backbone to any story. Mrs.

Makebelieve has and holds all the privileges of the poor and the lonely. Moreover, she is the eternal Charwoman. "She could not remain for any length of time in peoples' employment without being troubled by the fact that these folk had houses of their own and were actually employing her in a menial capacity." Mrs. Makebelieve is, I think, a typical figure. She is the incarnation of the pride and liveliness and imaginative exuberance that permit the poor to live.

How poor are Mary and Mrs. Makebelieve? We know their lack by the measure of their desire. Mrs. Makebelieve, always generous, would have paid her servants Ten s.h.i.+llings per Week each, and their Board. And we know that she had often observed desolate people dragging themselves through the streets, standing to glare through the windows of bakeries and confectioners' shops, with little children in some of their arms, and that thinking of such things every morsel she ate would have choked her were it not for her own hunger. By our being brought to desire what Mary and her mother desired we come to know the things they lacked.

Yes, poverty was the state in which Mary and Mrs. Makebelieve existed, but freedom was the other side of that poverty. They had not to set the bounds of realization upon their wishes. They were not shut off, as too many of us are, from the adventure and the enchantment that are in things. A broken mirror upon the wall of a bare room! It is, after all, that wonder of wonders, a thing. But one cannot convey to those who have not known the wonder, how wonderful a mere thing is! A child who has watched and watched the face of a grandfather's clock, stopped before he was born, feels this wonder. To grown folk and to those who have many possessions the things they own are lumber, some more convenient, some more decorative than others. But to those who have few possessions things are familiars and have an intimate history.

Hence it is only the poor or only unspoiled children that have the full freedom of things--who can enter into their adventure and their enchantment. Mary and her mother have this franchise. And for this reason also "Mary, Mary" has an inner resemblance to a folk-tale. For the folk-tale, shaped as it has been by the poor and by unspoiled people, reveals always the adventure and the enchantment of things.

An old lamp may be Aladdin's. A comb might kill a false queen. A key may open the door of a secret chamber. A dish may be the supreme possession of a King. The sense of the uniqueness of things--the sense that the teller of the folk-tale has always, and that such a poet of the poor as Burns has often, is in "Mary, Mary." And there is in it too the zest that the hungry--not the starved but the hungry--have for life. James Stephens says of the young man who became Mary's champion, "His ally and stay was hunger, and there is no better ally for any man: that satisfied and the game is up; for hunger is life, ambition, good will and understanding, while fulness is all those negatives which culminate in greediness, stupidity, and decay."

The scene of the story is that grey-colored, friendly capital--Dublin.

It is not the tortuous, inimical, Aristotlian-minded Dublin of James Joyce's "Portrait of the Artist"--it is the Dublin of the simple-hearted Dubliner: Dublin with its great grey clouds and its poising sea-birds, with its hills and its bay, with its streets that everyone would avoid and with its other streets that everyone promenades; with its greens and its park and its river-walks--Dublin, always friendly. It is true that there are in it those who, as the Policeman told Mary, are born by stealth, eat by subterfuge, drink by dodges, get married by antics, and slide into death by strange, subterranean pa.s.sages. Well, even these would be kindly and humorous the reader of "Mary, Mary" knows. James Stephens has made Dublin a place where the heart likes to dwell.

And would to G.o.d that I to-day Saw sunlight on the Hill of Howth, And sunlight on the Golden Spears, And sunlight out on Dublin Bay.

So one who has known Dublin might well exclaim on reading "Mary, Mary"

east or west of Eirinn.

James Stephens brought a fresh and distinctive element into the new Irish literature--an imaginative exuberance that in its rush of expression became extravagant, witty, picturesque and lovely. His work began to appear about 1906. Like the rest of the young Irish writers he made his appearance in the weekly journal "Sinn Fein," contributing to it his first poems and his mordant or extravagant essays and stories.

At once he made a public for himself. His first poems were published in a volume called "Insurrections" and his public became a wide one.

"Mary, Mary" brought out in 1912 was his first prose book. His next, the uncla.s.sifiable "Crock of Gold," was given the De Polignac Prize in 1914.

Since then he has published two other prose books--"Here Are Ladies" and "The Demi-G.o.ds," with three books of verse, "The Hill of Vision," "Songs from the Clay," and "The Rocky Road to Dublin."

"Insurrections," written just before "Mary, Mary," has vivid revelations of personality. "I saw G.o.d--do you doubt it?" says Tomas an Buile in the "pub."--

I saw G.o.d. Do you doubt it?

Do you dare to doubt it?

I saw the Almighty Man. His hand Was resting on a mountain, and He looked upon the World and all about it: I saw Him plainer than you see me now, You mustn't doubt it.

He was not satisfied; His look was all dissatisfied.

His beard swung on a wind far out of sight Behind the world's curve, and there was light Most fearful from His forehead, and He sighed, "That star went always wrong, and from the start I was dissatisfied."

He lifted up His hand-- I say He heaved a dreadful hand Over the spinning Earth, then I said "Stay, You must not strike it, G.o.d; I'm in the way; And I will never move from where I stand."

He said, "Dear child, I feared that you were dead,"

And stayed His hand.

His G.o.d is never a lonely G.o.d--he has need of humanity, and the quick champion of humanity springs straight into the love of G.o.d. Such is the intuition that is in all James Stephens' books.

He is the only author I have ever known whose talk is like his books.

The prodigality of humour, intuition and searching thought that he puts into his pages he also puts into what he says. And he is the only man I ever met who can sing his stories as well as tell them. Like the rest of the Irish writers of to-day, what he writes has a sense of spiritual equality as amongst all men and women--a sense of a democracy that is inherent in the world.

[Ill.u.s.tration: signature: Padraic Colum]

New York, September, 1917.

MARY, MARY

I

Mary Makebelieve lived with her mother in a small room at the very top of a big, dingy house in a Dublin back street. As long as she could remember she had lived in that top back room. She knew every crack in the ceiling, and they were numerous and of strange shapes. Every spot of mildew on the ancient wall-paper was familiar. She had, indeed, watched the growth of most from a grayish shade to a dark stain, from a spot to a great blob, and the holes in the skirting of the walls, out of which at nighttime the c.o.c.kroaches came rattling, she knew also. There was but one window in the room, and when she wished to look out of it she had to push the window up, because the grime of many years had so encrusted the gla.s.s that it was of no more than the demi-semi-transparency of thin horn. When she did look there was nothing to see but a bulky array of chimney-pots crowning a next-door house, and these continually hurled jays of soot against her window; therefore, she did not care to look out often, for each time that she did so she was forced to wash herself, and as water had to be carried from the very bottom of the five-story house up hundreds and hundreds of stairs to her room, she disliked having to use too much water.

Her mother seldom washed at all. She held that was.h.i.+ng was very unhealthy and took the natural gloss off the face, and that, moreover, soap either tightened the skin or made it wrinkle. Her own face was very tight in some places and very loose in others, and Mary Makebelieve often thought that the tight places were spots which her mother used to wash when she was young, and the loose parts were those which had never been washed at all. She thought that she would prefer to be either loose all over her face or tight all over it, and, therefore, when she washed she did it thoroughly, and when she abstained she allowed of no compromise.

Her mother's face was the color of old, old ivory. Her nose was like a great strong beak, and on it the skin was stretched very tightly, so that her nose shone dully when the candle was lit. Her eyes were big and as black as pools of ink and as bright as the eyes of a bird. Her hair also was black, it was as smooth as the finest silk, and when unloosened it hung straightly down, s.h.i.+ning about her ivory face. Her lips were thin and scarcely colored at all, and her hands were sharp, quick hands, seeming all knuckle when she closed them and all fingers when they were opened again.

Mary Makebelieve loved her mother very dearly, and her mother returned her affection with an overwhelming pa.s.sion that sometimes surged into physically painful caresses. When her mother hugged her for any length of time she soon wept, rocking herself and her daughter to and fro, and her clutch became then so frantic that poor Mary Makebelieve found it difficult to draw her breath; but she would not for the world have disturbed the career of her mother's love. Indeed, she found some pleasure in the fierceness of those caresses, and welcomed the pain far more than she reprobated it.

Her mother went out early every morning to work, and seldom returned home until late at night. She was a charwoman, and her work was to scrub out rooms and wash down staircases. She also did cooking when she was asked, and needlework when she got any to do. She had made exquisite dresses which were worn by beautiful young girls at b.a.l.l.s and picnics, and fine, white s.h.i.+rts that great gentlemen wore when they were dining, and fanciful waistcoats for gay young men, and silk stockings for dancing in--but that was a long time ago, because these beautiful things used to make her very angry when they were taken from her, so that she cursed the people who came to take them away and sometimes tore up the dresses and danced on them and screamed.

She used often to cry because she was not rich. Sometimes, when she came home from work, she liked to pretend that she was rich; she would play at imagining that some one had died and left her a great fortune, or that her brother Patrick had come back from America with vast wealth, and then she would tell Mary Makebelieve of the things she intended to buy and do the very next day. Mary Makebelieve liked that.... They were to move the first thing in the morning to a big house with a garden behind it full of fruit trees and flowers and birds. There would be a wide lawn in front of the house to play lawn tennis in and to walk with delicately fine young men with fair faces and white hands, who would speak in the French language and bow often with their hats almost touching the ground. There were to be twelve servants--six of them men servants and six of them women servants--who would instantly do as they were bidden and would receive ten s.h.i.+llings each per week and their board; they would also have two nights free in the week, and would be very well fed. There were many wonderful dresses to be bought, dresses for walking in the streets and dresses for driving in a carriage, and others again for riding on horseback and for traveling in. There was a dress of crimson silk with a deep lace collar, and a heavy, wine-colored satin dress with a gold chain falling down in front of it, and there was a pretty white dress of the finest linen, having one red rose pinned at the waist. There were black silken stockings with quaint designs worked on them in red silk, and scarves of silver gauze, and others embroidered with flowers and little shapes of men and women.

When her mother was planning all these things she was very happy, but afterwards she used to cry bitterly and rock her daughter to and fro on her breast until she hurt her.

II

Every morning about six o'clock Mary Makebelieve left her bed and lit the fire. It was an ugly fire to light, because the chimney had never been swept, and there was no draught. Also they never had any sticks in the house, and sc.r.a.ps of paper twisted tightly into b.a.l.l.s with the last night's cinders placed on them and a handful of small coals strewn on the top were used instead. Sometimes the fire blazed up quickly, and that made her happy, but at other times it went out three and four, and often half a dozen times; then the little bottle of paraffin oil had to be squandered--a few rags well steeped in the oil with a newspaper stretched over the grate seldom failed to coax enough fire to boil the saucepan of water; generally this method smoked the water, and then the tea tasted so horrid that one only drank it for the sake of economy.

Mrs. Makebelieve liked to lie in bed until the last possible moment.

As there was no table in the room, Mary used to bring the two cups of tea, the tin of condensed milk, and the quarter of a loaf over to the bed, and there she and her mother took their breakfast.

From the time she opened her eyes in the morning her mother never ceased to talk. It was then she went over all the things that had happened on the previous day and enumerated the places she would have to go to on the present day, and the chances for and against the making of a little money. At this meal she used to arrange also to have the room re-papered and the chimney swept and the rat-holes stopped up--there were three of these, one was on the left-hand side of the fire grate, the other two were under the bed, and Mary Makebelieve had lain awake many a night listening to the gnawing of teeth on the skirting and the scamper of little feet here and there on the floor. Her mother further arranged to have a Turkey carpet placed on the floor, although she admitted that oilcloth or linoleum was easier to clean, but they were not so nice to the feet or the eye.

Into all these improvements her daughter entered with the greatest delight. There was to be a red mahogany chest of drawers against one wall and a rosewood piano against the wall opposite. A fender of s.h.i.+ning bra.s.s with brazen furniture, a bright, copper kettle for boiling water in, and an iron pot for cooking potatoes and meat; there was to be a life-sized picture of Mary over the mantelpiece and a picture of her mother near the window in a golden frame, also a picture of a Newfoundland dog lying in a barrel and a little wee terrier crawling up to make friends with him, and a picture of a battle between black people and soldiers.