Ray Bradbury Stories Volume 2

‘Maybe he was once.’

‘Oh, he’s too good to be standing here.’

‘I’ve thought that often.’

My wife fumbled with her purse. I looked from her to the singing man, the rain falling on his bare head, streaming through his shellacked hair, trembling on his ear lobes. My wife had her purse open.

And then, the strange perversity. Before my wife could move toward him, I took her elbow and led her down the other side of the bridge. She pulled back for a moment, giving me a look, then came along.

As we went away along the bank of the Liffey, he started a new song, one we had heard often in Ireland. Glancing back, I saw him, head proud, black glasses taking the pour, mouth open, and the fine voice clear:

‘I’ll be glad when you’re deadin your grave, old man,Be glad when you’re deadin your grave, old man.Be glad when you’re dead,Flowers over your head,And then I’ll marry the journeyman.…’

It is only later, looking back, that you see that while you were doing all the other things in your life, working on an article concerning one part of Ireland in your rain-battered hotel, taking your wife to dinner, wandering in the museums, you also had an eye beyond to the street and those who served themselves who only stood to wait.

The beggars of Dublin, who bothers to wonder on them, look, see, know, understand? Yet the outer shell of the eye sees and the inner shell of the mind records, and yourself, caught between, ignores the rare service these two halves of a bright sense are up to.

So I did and did not concern myself with beggars. So I did run from them or walk to meet them, by turn. So I heard but did not hear, considered but did not consider:

‘There’s only a few of us left!’

One day I was sure the stone gargoyle man taking his daily shower on O’Connell Bridge while he sang Irish opera was not blind. And the next his head to me was a cup of darkness.

One afternoon I found myself lingering before a tweed shop near O’Connell Bridge, staring in, staring in at a stack of good thick burly caps. I did not need another cap, I had a life’s supply collected in a suitcase, yet in I went to pay out money for a fine warm brown-colored cap which I turned round and round in my hands, in a strange trance.

‘Sir,’ said the clerk. ‘That cap is a seven. I would guess your head, sir, at a seven and one half.’

‘This will fit me. This will fit me.’ I stuffed the cap into my pocket.

‘Let me get you a sack, sir—’

‘No!’ Hot-cheeked, suddenly suspicious of what I was up to, I fled.

There was the bridge in the soft rain. All I need do now was walk over –

In the middle of the bridge, my singing man was not there.

In his place stood an old man and woman cranking a great piano-box hurdy-gurdy which ratcheted and coughed like a coffee grinder eating glass and stone, giving forth no melody but a grand and melancholy sort of iron indigestion.

I waited for the tune, if tune it was, to finish. I kneaded the new tweed cap in my sweaty fist while the hurdy-gurdy prickled, spanged and thumped.

‘Be damned to ya!’ the old man and old woman, furious with their job, seemed to say, their faces thunderous pale, their eyes red-hot in the rain. ‘Pay us! Listen! But we’ll give you no tune! Make up your own!’ their mute lips said.

And standing there on the spot where the beggar always sang without his cap, I thought, Why don’t they take one fiftieth of the money they make each month and have the thing tuned? If I were cranking the box, I’d want a tune, at least for myself! If you were cranking the box, I answered. But you’re not. And it’s obvious they hate the begging job, who’d blame them, and want no part of giving back a familiar song as recompense.

How different from my capless friend.

My friend?

I blinked with surprise, then stepped forward and nodded.

‘Beg pardon. The man with the concertina …’

The woman stopped cranking and glared at me.

‘Ah?’

‘The man with no cap in the rain.’

‘Ah, him!’ snapped the woman.

‘He’s not here today?’

‘Do you see him?’ cried the woman.

She started cranking the infernal device.

I put a penny in the tin cup.

She peered at me as if I’d spit in the cup.

I put in another penny. She stopped.

‘Do you know where he is?’ I asked.

‘Sick. In bed. The damn cold! We heard him go off, coughing.’

‘Do you know where he lives?’

‘No!’

‘Do you know his name?’

‘Now, who would know that!’

I stood there, feeling directionless, thinking of the man somewhere off in the town, alone. I looked at the new cap foolishly.

The two old people were watching me uneasily.

I put a last shilling in the cup.

‘He’ll be all right,’ I said, not to them, but to someone, hopefully, myself.

The woman heaved the crank. The bucketing machine let loose a fall of glass and junk in its hideous interior.

‘The tune,’ I said, numbly. ‘What is it?’

‘You’re deaf!’ snapped the woman. ‘It’s the national anthem! Do you mind removing your cap?’