Argosy: The Short Story Magazine — page 56: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

See ee <5 ue =! or OE ti Nee a” pros ‘owes & “me "ip le oe ian tale sank” od re ay he i E~ 2 " “ V; - 56 BRIAN CLEEVE And so Fran, who would have been a princess in a big city, with a dozen men at her feet, hadn’t a man at all in Ballysaggart, except me, and she didn’t like me very much. I wasn’t really her style of man, and I knew it, and she knew it, and when we were together because she had no one else to be with, she’d take it out on me. I was hardly taller than she was, and I had thin wrists, and a bit of a limp where the bone hadn’t set properly after I’d broken my leg one time as a child, and when the others were playing hurley I’d be left watching, or minding the goal. Jamie the Book, they called me, because I was always reading, and about the only real friend I had in the place was the school- master. From the time we were small I was the odd one out among the boys, and she was the odd one out with the girls. That threw us together, but it never made her like me, and as I’ve said, she used to take it out on me. “ Like that night coming home from the dance. She let me dance with her, when she hadn’t anyone else, and she let me walk home with her, rather than have the other girls see that she had no one to walk with her, but she didn’t talk to me. She just walked beside me, carrying her dance shoes, her face white and sullen in the moonlight. I could feel the warmth of her, and sometimes her arm would brush against mine by accident. There was a faint scent from her dress, and her hair was like a dark shadow swinging at her shoulders. I wanted to say something to her, tell her how beautiful she was, but I was afraid. I knew how she’d turn to me, her eyes grey-green and cold as the sea, her mouth contemptuous, and she wouldn’t need to answer me. And I’d just blush and stam- mer, as I had a dozen and two dozen times before. 7 That was the kind of thing that drove the other boys away from her. ‘The sureness of her, the bold swing of her when she walked, and the way she’d look a man straight in the face. They may like that kind of thing in the cinema in Ireland, but they don’t like it in a wife. It’s the girl with the little, meek voice and a couple of hundred pounds put by from her wages that they’re looking for. A girl like Fran only frightens them, when she doesn’t annoy them. She frightened me too, though in a different way, and so I just walked beside her, while the others strung out behind us, pairing off two and two and stopping now and then for a bit of a court in the shadow thrown by a tree, or when the moon hid herself behind a cloud. comiclooks.comn)