The Hard Life by Flann O’Brien Read Free Book Online

another name for death. Often it means a miraculous recovery. I know of many cases.
    The brother spoke.
    –Should I go for Dr Blennerhassett?
    –No, no, Mr Collopy said. He is due to call tonight anyway.
    –Let us not be presumptuous, Collopy, Father Fahrt said gently. We do not know God’s ways. She may be on her feet again in two weeks. We should pray.
    But in four days Mrs Crotty was dead.

8
    A BOUT the time of Mrs Crotty’s death, the brother’s ‘business’ had grown to a surprising size. He had got a box—fitly enough, a soap-box—from Davies the grocers, and went down to the hall every morning very early to collect the little avalanche of letters awaiting him there before they should come to the notice of Mr Collopy. Still using our home address, he had become, in addition to Professor Latimer Dodds, The Excelsior Turf Bureau operated, I suspect, on the old system of dividing clients into groups equal to the number of runners in a given race, and sending a different horse with any chance to each group. No matter which horse won, a group of clients would have backed it, and one of the brother’s rules of business was that a winning client should send him the odds to five shillings. He was by now smoking openly in the house and several times I saw him coming out of or going into a public house, usually with a rather down-at-heel character. He had money to spend.
    He also operated the Zenith School of Journalism, which claimed to be able to explain how to make a fortune with the pen in twelve ‘clear, analytical, precise and unparagoned lessons’. As well he was trying to flood Britain with a treatise on cage-birds, published by the Simplex Nature Press, which also issued a Guide to Gardening, both works obviously composed of material looted from books in the National Library. He had put away his little press and now had printing done by an impoverished back-lane man with some small semblance of machinery. He once asked me to get stamps for him, giving me two pounds; this gives some idea of the volume of his correspondence.
    He seemed in a bad temper the evening the remains of Mrs Crotty were brought to the church at Haddington Road; he did not come home afterwards but walked off without a word, possibly to visit a public house. Next morning dawned dark, forbidding and very wet, suitable enough, 1 thought, for a funeral. I thought of Wordsworth and his wretched ‘Pathetic Fallacy’. The brother, still in a bad temper, went down as usual to collect his mail.
    –To hell with this house and this existence, he said when he came back. Now we will have to trail out to Deansgrange in this dirty downpour.
    –Mrs Crotty wasn’t the worst, I said. Surely you don’t begrudge her a funeral? You’ll need one yourself some day.
    –She was all right, he conceded. It’s her damned husband I’m getting very tired of…
    Mr Hanafin called with his cab for myself, the brother, Mr Collopy and Annie. The hearse and two other cabs were waiting at the church, the cabs accommodating mysterious other mourners who hurried to Mr Collopy and Annie with whispers and earnest handshakes. Myself and the brother were ignored. As the Mass was about to begin, a third cab arrived with three elderly ladies and a tall, emaciated gentleman in severe black. These, I gathered later, were members of the committee assisting Mr Collopy in his work, whatever that was.
    The hearse elected to take the route along Merrion Road by the sea, where a sort of hurricane was in progress. The cabs following stumbled on the exposed terrain. Mr Collopy, showing some signs of genuine grief, spoke little.
    –Poor Mrs Crotty was very fond of the sea, he said at last.
    –Seemingly she was, Annie remarked. She told me once that when she was a girl, nothing could keep her out of the sea at Clontarf. She could swim and all.
    –Yes, a most versatile woman, Mr Collopy said. And a saint.
    A burial on a wet day, with the rain lashing down on the mourners, is a