Now, as may be inferred, Sammy Durgan did not always adhere strictly to the truth—not that he swerved from it with vicious intent, but that, like some other things, trouble for instance, the swerving had grown, as it were, to be a habit. Mrs. Durgan did not have a cough, neither was she worrying about the unpaid rent. Mrs. Durgan, speaking strictly in a physical sense, was mightiest among women in Big Cloud, and on the night the story proper opens—a very black night for Sammy Durgan—Sammy Durgan was sitting on Mrs. Durgan's front door step, and the door was locked upon him. Sammy Durgan, paradoxical as it may sound, though temporarily out of a job again and with no job to be fired from, was being fired at that moment harder than he had ever been fired before in his life—and the firing was being done by Mrs. Durgan. It had been threatening for quite a while, quite a long while, two or three years, but it none the less came to Sammy Durgan with something of a shock, and he gasped.
Mrs. Durgan was intensely Irish, from purer stock than Sammy Durgan, and through the window Mrs. Durgan spoke barbed words:
"'Tis shame yez should take to yersilf, Sammy Durgan, if yez had the sinse to take annything—the loikes av yez, a big strong man! 'Tis years I've put up wid yez, whin another woman would not, but I'll put up wid yez no more! 'Tis the ind this night, Sammy Durgan, an' the Holy Mither be praised there's no children to blush fer the disgrace yez are!"
"Maria," said Sammy Durgan craftily, for this had worked before, "do I drink?"
Mrs. Durgan choked in her rage.
"I do not," said Sammy Durgan soothingly. "And who but me lays the pay envelopes on your lap without so much as tearing 'em to count the insides of 'em? Listen here, Maria, listen——"
"Is ut mocking me, yez are!" shrieked Mrs. Durgan. "'Tis little good the opening av 'em would do! Listen, is ut, to the smooth tongue av yez! I've listened till me fingers are bare to the bone wid the washtubs to kape a roof over me head. I'll listen no more, Sammy Durgan, moind thot!"
"Maria," said Sammy Durgan, with a softness that was meant to turn away wrath, "Maria, open the door."
"I will not," said Mrs. Durgan, with a truculent gasp. "Niver! Not while yez live, Sammy Durgan—fer yez funeral mabbe, but fer no less than thot, an' thin only fer the joy av bein' a widdy!"
It sounded inevitable. There was a sort of cold uncompromise even in the fire of Mrs. Durgan's voice. Sammy Durgan rose heavily from the doorstep.