[adapted]

by
James Joyce

Lily, the caretaker’s daughter, was very busy. She had just brought one gentleman into the little room behind the office on the ground floor and helped him take off his overcoat when the noisy hall door bell rang again and she had to run quickly along the empty hall to let in another guest. It was good for her that she did not have to look after the ladies also. But Miss Kate and Miss Julia had thought of that and had changed the bathroom upstairs into a dressing room for ladies. Miss Kate and Miss Julia were there, chatting and laughing and being busy, walking one after another to the top of the stairs, looking down over the railings and calling down to Lily to ask her who had come.

It was always a big event, the Misses Morkan’s yearly dance. Everybody who knew them came to it, members of the family, old friends of the family, the members of Julia’s choir, any of Kate’s students that were grown up enough, and even some of Mary Jane’s students too. Never once had it been a failure. For years and years it had gone very well as long as anyone could remember; ever since Kate and Julia, after the death of their brother Pat, had left the house in Stoney Batter and taken Mary Jane, their only niece, to live with them in the dark, bare house on Usher’s Island, the upper part of which they had rented from Mr. Fulham, the corn merchant on the ground floor. That was a good thirty years ago, at least. Mary Jane, who was then a little girl in short dresses, was now the main support of the household, for she played the organ in Haddington Road. She had studied at the Academy and gave a students’ concert every year in the upstairs room of the Antient Concert Rooms. Many of her students were from richer families on the Kingstown and Dalkey line. Old as they were, her aunts also did their share. Julia, though she was quite grey, was still the main soprano singer in Adam and Eve’s, and Kate, being too weak to go out much, gave music lessons to beginners on the old square piano in the back room. Lily, the caretaker’s daughter, did maid’s work for them. Though their life was simple they believed in eating well; the best of everything: diamond-bone sirloins, tea that cost three shillings and the best bottled dark beer. But Lily seldom made mistakes in the orders so that she got on well with her three lady employers. They were hard to please, that was all. But the only thing they would not allow was talking back.

Of course they had good reason to be nervous on such a night. And then it was long after ten o’clock and yet Gabriel and his wife had not arrived. Besides they were very afraid that Freddy Malins might come drunk. They really did not want any of Mary Jane’s pupils to see him drunk; and when he was like that it was sometimes very hard to control him. Freddy Malins always came late but they wondered what could be keeping Gabriel: and that was what brought them every two minutes to the stairs to ask Lily if Gabriel or Freddy had come.

“Oh, Mr. Conroy,” said Lily to Gabriel when she opened the door for him, “Miss Kate and Miss Julia thought you were never coming. Good-night, Mrs. Conroy.”

“I bet they did,” said Gabriel, “but they forget that my wife here takes three long hours to dress herself.”

He stood on the mat, wiping the snow off his boots, while Lily led his wife to the bottom of the stairs and called out:

“Miss Kate, here is Mrs. Conroy.”

Kate and Julia came slowly down the dark stairs right away. Both of them kissed Gabriel’s wife, said she must be very cold and asked if Gabriel was with her.

“Here I am, all right, Aunt Kate! Go on up. I’ll follow,” called out Gabriel from the dark.

He kept wiping his feet hard while the three women went upstairs, laughing, to the women’s dressing-room. A thin line of snow lay like a cape on the shoulders of his overcoat and like caps on the toes of his overshoes; and, as the buttons of his overcoat slipped with a squeaking noise through the cloth made stiff by snow, a cold, sweet-smelling air from outside came out from gaps and folds.

“Is it snowing again, Mr. Conroy?” asked Lily.

She had gone ahead of him into the pantry to help him take off his coat. Gabriel smiled at the three parts she had given his last name and looked at her. She was a thin, growing girl, with a pale face and with hay-coloured hair. The gas in the pantry made her look even paler. Gabriel had known her when she was a child and used to sit on the lowest step holding a rag doll.

“Yes, Lily,” he answered, “and I think we will have a long night.”

He looked up at the ceiling of the store room, which was shaking with the heavy steps and the sliding of feet on the floor above, listened for a moment to the piano and then looked quickly at the girl, who was folding his coat carefully at the end of a shelf.

“Tell me, Lily,” he said in a friendly voice, “do you still go to school?”

“O no, sir,” she said. “I finished school more than a year ago.”

“O, then,” said Gabriel happily, “I think we’ll be going to your wedding one of these days with your boyfriend, right?”

The girl looked back at him over her shoulder and said very angrily:

“The men today are only all talk and what they can get from you.”

Gabriel turned red as if he thought he had made a mistake and, without looking at her, kicked off his boots and brushed quickly with his scarf at his shiny leather shoes.

He was a big, fairly tall young man. The strong colour of his cheeks rose up even to his forehead where it spread out in a few shapeless spots of light red; and on his smooth face with no hair there shone and moved the shiny lenses and the bright gold frames of the glasses which hid his fine and restless eyes. His shiny black hair was parted in the middle and brushed in a long curve behind his ears where it curled a little under the mark left by his hat.

When he had shined his shoes he stood up and pulled his vest down more tightly on his fat body. Then he took a coin quickly from his pocket.

“Oh, Lily,” he said, putting it into her hands, “it’s Christmas-time, isn’t it? Just … here’s a little….”

He walked quickly towards the door.

“Oh no, sir!” said the girl, following him. “Really, sir, I wouldn’t take it.”

“Christmas-time! Christmas-time!” said Gabriel, almost running to the stairs and waving his hand to her as if to stop her.

The girl, when she saw that he had reached the stairs, called out after him:

“Well, thank you, sir.”

He waited outside the drawing room door until the waltz finished, listening to the skirts that brushed against it and to the shuffling of feet. He was still upset by the girl’s sharp and sudden reply. It had made him feel sad, which he tried to get rid of by straightening his cuffs and the bows of his tie. He then took a small paper from his vest pocket and looked at the points he had made for his speech. He was not sure about the lines from Robert Browning because he feared they would be too hard for his listeners. A quote that they would know from Shakespeare or from the Melodies would be better. The loud clacking of the men’s heels and the shuffling of their soles reminded him that their level of education was not the same as his. He would only make himself ridiculous by quoting poetry to them that they could not understand. They would think that he was showing off his better education. He would fail with them just as he had failed with the girl in the pantry. He had taken the wrong tone. His whole speech was a mistake from beginning to end, a complete failure.

Just then his aunts and his wife came out of the women’s dressing room. His aunts were two small simply dressed old women. Aunt Julia was about an inch taller. Her hair, pulled low over the tops of her ears, was grey; and grey also, with darker shadows, was her large loose face. Though she was heavy in build and stood straight her slow eyes and parted lips made her look like a woman who did not know where she was or where she was going. Aunt Kate was more lively. Her face, healthier than her sister’s, was all wrinkles and lines, like a dried red apple, and her hair, braided in the same old-fashioned way, had not lost its ripe nut colour.

They both kissed Gabriel openly. He was their favourite nephew, the son of their dead older sister, Ellen, who had married T. J. Conroy of the Port and Docks.

“Gretta tells me you’re not going to take a taxi back to Monkstown tonight, Gabriel,” said Aunt Kate.

“No,” said Gabriel, turning to his wife, “we had quite enough of that last year, didn’t we? Don’t you remember, Aunt Kate, what a bad cold Gretta got from it? Cab windows shaking all the way, and the wind from the east blowing in after we passed Merrion. Very nice it was. Gretta caught a bad cold.”

Aunt Kate frowned seriously and nodded her head at every word.

“That’s right, Gabriel, that’s right,” she said. “You must be very careful.”

“But as for Gretta there,” said Gabriel, “she would walk home in the snow if she was allowed.”

Mrs. Conroy laughed.

“Don’t mind him, Aunt Kate,” she said. “He’s really an awful bother, with green eye shades for Tom’s eyes at night and making him do exercises with weights, and making Eva eat the porridge. The poor child! And she really hates it!… O, but you’ll never guess what he makes me wear now!”

She started to laugh loudly and looked at her husband, whose loving and happy eyes had been moving from her dress to her face and hair. The two aunts laughed loudly too, because Gabriel’s care was always a joke to them.

“Rain boots!” said Mrs Conroy. “That’s the newest thing. Whenever the ground is wet I must put on my rain boots. Tonight he even wanted me to put them on, but I wouldn’t. The next thing he will buy me will be a diving suit.”

Gabriel laughed nervously and patted his tie to calm himself while Aunt Kate nearly bent over with laughter, she enjoyed the joke very much. The smile soon went away from Aunt Julia’s face and her serious eyes turned towards her nephew’s face. After a pause she asked:

“And what are rain boots, Gabriel?”

“Goloshes, Julia!” said her sister. “Oh dear, don’t you know what goloshes are? You wear them over your … over your boots, Gretta, isn’t it?”

“Yes,” said Mrs. Conroy. “Rubber things. We both have a pair now. Gabriel says everyone wears them in Europe.”

“Oh, in Europe,” said Aunt Julia softly, nodding her head slowly.

Gabriel frowned and said, as if he were a little angry:

“It’s nothing very special but Gretta thinks it very funny because she says the word reminds her of Christy Minstrels.”

“But tell me, Gabriel,” said Aunt Kate, in a quick, polite way. “Of course, you have checked the room. Gretta was saying….”

“Oh, the room is all right,” said Gabriel. “I’ve booked one at the Gresham.”

“Of course,” said Aunt Kate, “the very best thing to do. And the children, Gretta, you’re not worried about them?”

“Oh, for one night,” said Mrs. Conroy. “Also, Bessie will look after them.”

“Of course,” said Aunt Kate again. “What a help it is to have a girl like that, one you can depend on! There is that Lily, I am sure I do not know what has happened to her lately. She is not the same girl she was at all.”

Gabriel was going to ask his aunt some questions about this but she stopped suddenly to watch her sister who had gone down the stairs and was stretching her neck over the stair rail.

“Now, I ask you,” she said almost angrily, “where is Julia going? Julia! Julia! Where are you going?”

Julia, who had gone halfway down one set of stairs, came back and said calmly: