"I have a very special reason for wanting to know. Things can"t go on like this, can they? Something is going to happen, isn"t it? Something is going to happen soon?"
"Nothing whatever is going to happen."
Millie gave a long sigh and her arms dropped to her sides. "Well, it makes an easy war."
Pat ignored this. Lowering his voice he said, "You shouldn"t talk so. Now please let me out."
There was a sudden sound from behind the half-open door of one of the front rooms. The room was in semi-darkness as the huge red velvet curtains had been released from the cords and covered half the window. In the centre a little yellow light entered through the thickly worked lace. It was raining outside.
Millie gave a startled hiss, and then darted to the door of the room, throwing it wide open. Pat followed her. In the soupy twilight he saw a rotund figure stretching and uncurling in a big leather armchair. It was his stepfather Barnabas Drumm.
Millie was transfigured. She bounded furiously forward and cracked the flat of her hand down upon the table. "What are you doing in here, you beast? Why are you spying on us? What do you mean by it? Get up!"
Barnabas got to his feet, gaping miserably at Millie and over her shoulder at Pat. He was hunched up, shrinking into himself like a disturbed spider. "Sure I just fell asleep. I wasn"t spying, Millie, word of honour. I meant no harm. I don"t know why, I just fell asleep."
"I know you creep about and listen. I know your mean ways. Well, take your drunken sleep somewhere else. Go on, get away with you!" Her long skirt swirled as she aimed a kick at him.
Barney edged round the chair and then bolted past them as if fearing another kick. He fled, not out of the house but toward the back quarters as if to take refuge dog-like in the kitchen.
The incident disgusted Pat. He knew, but preferred not to reflect on, the fact that Barnabas trailed about after Millie and she contemptuously tolerated him. But what angered him now was that Millie simply did not seem to have realized that the person she was thus humiliating was Pat"s stepfather.
Millie herself seemed to become aware of this a second later. She put her hands to her face and said, "I"m sorry-"
"Well, goodbye." Pat quickly opened the front door and let himself out into the rain. He turned up his coat collar. She is trash, he thought as he strode away, she is trash, she is trash.
Chapter Seven.
"AT this period of my life I imperceptibly became aware that I was becoming steadily estranged from my sister Hilda. Perhaps such slow partings, who knows, are our inevitable rehearsals for the final severance. Hilda and I had been united, at an obscure but effectively deep level during childhood by our joint opposition to our parents. But, as time and circ.u.mstance shook our characters into position, it became clear that we abhorred the parental way of life for different reasons: Hilda, because it was brittle, noisy, shrewdly inexpensive, and not socially grand; I, because it was utterly unspiritual.
"There was also, and I felt this increasingly whenever Hilda visited Ireland, the fact that she did not understand either of the women in my life or appreciate the subtle threads of my relationship with them. She was simply not "in the picture"! The dumb devotion of Kathleen, the tender possessive raillery of Millie: Hilda could make little of all this. Indeed, self-absorbed as always, she saw very little; but what her intuition silently told her was that there were women, and women whom she variously deemed unworthy, who were rivals for the monopoly of her adored brother."
Barnabas Drumm had penned these words that very afternoon as he sat at his "work" in the National Library, and they now ran through and through his head, all pure and glittering like a clear brook. Or perhaps the words were the stones in the brook, speckled and smooth, which through a trembling translucent medium he saw steadfastly arrayed before him. His words, it seemed to him, rang out with a quiet authority; and when he had uttered a convincing pa.s.sage it remained with him and eased his spirit for the rest of the day. For several years now Barney had been secretly working on his Memoir. The tattered notebooks about the Irish saints had been touched more intermittently and lately not touched at all. Barney had become completely absorbed in the more interesting task of self-a.n.a.lysis.
Barney had commenced this task when, after a Lenten retreat, he had decided that he must make a serious effort to find out "what had gone wrong". He must, in the most relentless way, examine himself. He had for too long a.s.sumed that he could lay it all at her door, could count himself a man ruined by a single catastrophe, a catastrophe which pa.s.sed in a matter of weeks. But a man"s life is not so easily destroyed; and as he realized this later he wished that he had known it then. He could have picked himself up. So if he was now the wreck that he was it could not simply be her fault. There must have been ancient reasons why he had made of himself the young man that he had, so lately it seemed to him, been, and other reasons, or perhaps the same ones, why he had gone on, with all the appearance of a ruthless intention, driving himself into a wilderness of the spirit. He was very unhappy and he felt that he deserved not to be. He did not especially hope that finding out what had gone wrong would help to put it right. He started his project in a mood of pure self-castigation. Sometimes he felt very old and told himself that the least he could do before he died was to face, clear-eyed and squarely, the wreck of his life. Later he found that the task he had undertaken was curiously consoling.
He had been a talented boy for whom much was hoped. He gained a top cla.s.sical scholarship at Cambridge and mastered Hebrew while still at the University. He was a crack shot and a noted rowing man. He had loving parents, an adoring sister, and plenty of friends. He had loving parents, and yet somehow, from the earliest times he could remember, Barney had resented his parents. He could not think what, in a small child, that resentment could have been. Later on it took form as a thorough impatience with the noisy frolicsome frivolity of the parental world. His fashionable-on-a-shoestring mother laughed, or rather screamed, too much, and his father"s ingenious set-piece parties and elaborate much screamed-over practical jokes seemed to him unbearably vulgar. He was hurt by their whole mode of being, although when he reflected upon their misdemeanours they did not really seem very grave. He decided to go to Ireland.
Barney"s mother, Grace Drumm, nee Richardson, was Anglo-Irish, a connection of the Kinnard family, and Barney and his sister had had their share of Irish holidays, during which Hilda had had her eyes dazzled by the splendours of Rathblane. Other things impressed Barney. Ireland was for him a dark place, slow, dignified and mystical: everything that was unlike the gay little, bright little flat in South Kensington. He lost his heart; and it was not long before, the focus shifting a little, he perceived that the mystic beauty of Ireland resided in the Catholic Church.
This perception developed into a great spiritual crisis during which it became clear to him that he had an extreme destiny. He must forswear the world and aim at perfect sanct.i.ty: anything less would be, for him, a meaningless, perhaps a disastrous, goal. He took himself away alone to the saint-haunted solitude of Clonmacnoise and stood beside the round tower in the holiest place in Ireland. Here he felt himself, in what later seemed to be a mystical experience, confronted, captured, claimed. What claimed him then was something very old and pure, a Christianity still simple and innocent of blood, whose humble and unpretentious saints lived in little low-roofed cells. The sacred river Shannon, flooding yellow-reeded between the small barrow-like hills, turned under his gaze from pewter-grey to blue and Barney decided that he must become a priest.
To the despair of the family he entered Maynooth and soon donned the soutane. He lived in a perpetual exaltation, giving himself up to austerities and enthusiasms which earned him many a shrewd rebuke from his spiritual advisers. He developed a pa.s.sionate relationship to the Eucharist. He constantly pictured himself, as it was soon to be, holding the very Body of Christ in his hand and feeding a starving kneeling flock which stretched away to the confines of the earth. At nights he dreamed of the Chalice from which the blood of his Master streamed to take away the sins of the world. He held the cup in his hands, turning with an unspeakable happiness to say, Ite, missa est. But he was never ordained. He quite suddenly fell in love with Millie.
Millie in fact, as it seemed later, simply coerced him into love. She was recently widowed and in a condition of intoxication with her new freedom. She had been but vaguely aware of him, had largely ignored him, at their few meetings since her marriage, and Barney had been equally un.o.bservant of her. But when Millie saw him in his soutane she suddenly, recklessly, coveted him. She never deceived him, at least not verbally. She simply wanted this black-robed priestling as her slave, a pet to fondle and caress. She wanted to arouse a blasphemous pa.s.sion in this pale long-skirted half man. She told him constantly that she was not in love with him. She just needed him to be in love with her. Barney found this absolutely pure-hearted wickedness quite irresistible.
He had had some vague emotional involvements with girls at Cambridge and had counted these as his wild oats. The experience with Millie was entirely different. He was shattered, scattered; and he could not help in fact believing that she loved him. She certainly behaved as if she did. His body, which had seemed a pure vessel, a spiritual temple, scoured, empty and awaiting the final installation of a ghostly visitor, now hotly and needfully enclosed him, a tugging animal of unquiet flesh. It was as if his veins had been emptied and given new blood. He became horribly incarnate; and when the desperately beautiful, desperately desirable Millie looked meltingly into his eyes and inclined her warm lips slowly upon his he felt that G.o.d was become man indeed. Of course, Millie restricted her favours to the most superficial caresses, thereby reducing him to a state near to madness. The end came with a party at Maynooth where Barney was discovered with Millie sitting on his knee. He left the College shortly afterwards.
In what order things happened then was never very clear to Barney in his memory: whether he repented and gave up Millie, or whether Millie dropped him and he repented. He often felt able to give himself the benefit of the doubt, since the shock of his dismissal brought back to him an appalling sense of what he had lost. While falling in love he had not explicitly told himself that this meant the end of his vocation. He suffered continual sharp pangs of guilt about what he was doing, but he still felt that he was acting somehow within the framework of his former intention. When that whole numinous world vanished from him and he found himself outside, with nothing to help him except the daily bread of the Church and the penny plain machinery of repentance, he felt himself so broken that he could hardly envisage himself any more as a man. Here Millie, even if she had not at once removed herself, could have been no use to him. In fact, when Millie saw Barney outside Maynooth, stripped of his soutane, a miserable confused young man running round Dublin looking for a job, her interest in him ceased abruptly; and after a meeting at which she treated the whole matter as a joke and then practically accused him of having invented it all, she ceased seeing him altogether. Perhaps she felt ashamed. If so, the only sign of it was that she kept this interlude a close secret and never spoke of it to anyone. Barney"s superiors at Maynooth were discreet, and Barney himself had no motives for being talkative, so the part which Millie had played in his life remained almost entirely unknown. It was thought that "some woman" had been involved in his decision not to be ordained, but beyond this even rumour did not go.
Kathleen, however, knew. By a curious accident, which Barney later felt to have been decisive in his life, Kathleen, admitted unexpectedly to the house in Upper Mount Street, found Millie and Barney in an embrace. Barney was never sure whether, if that had not happened, he would have chosen to confide in Kathleen; very possibly not. In any case the shock, the sudden appearance of Kathleen as a spectator, and her continued existence as one of the few people "in the know" gave her, for him, a privileged position. Through her surprised censorious eyes he saw himself, a robed ordinand pa.s.sionately embracing a pretty widow of dubious reputation. He resented her knowledge, but it also brought her near to him. In his dereliction, with both Millie and the priesthood lost to him, he had to turn to someone and he turned to Kathleen.
But why did he despair so quickly? he often asked himself. Why did he not accept the full force of the blow, regard himself as someone who, for years perhaps, must remain a broken, humbled man? He ought to have left Dublin and joined himself in a menial capacity to some remote religious house. There were places for such as he. For the disaster had not broken his faith. It had not broken it, but it must, he later felt, have temporarily cracked it, or he would not so quickly have attempted to rearrange the whole pattern of his wishes. He ought to have kept his attention fixed upon the priesthood, regarding that great treasure, which had been so nearly within his grasp, as having simply receded far away, perhaps impossibly far away, but still presenting itself as the only good. He ought to have repented relentlessly, ferociously, and been prepared to lie upon the ground. He ought, strip by strip, to have divested himself of his former mind, of everything that had made him frail and false. Instead of which, without hope, turning his back entirely upon all that had happened, he sought an immediate consolation.
Kathleen, herself lately left a widow, was several years his senior, and he turned to her at first as to a mother or an elder sister. He told her everything, everything not only about Millie but about his whole life, his childhood, his parents, everything. He came to her again and again; and Kathleen listened to him with a plain gentleness and wisdom which made her seem to him a supremely good woman, the first good woman that he had ever met. She uttered no reproaches, but she made no allowances and he was grateful for her willingness to judge him. Then there began to be a kind of meaning in his escape from the bad woman to the good woman. With an easeful sweetness which was quite unlike his recent frenzy he started to love her. And it seemed that she loved him too, loved him for his history and for his need of her. She represented suddenly and as it were all complete the possibility of the good life which he had previously sought in a mistaken quarter. He now saw himself as a Catholic husband, a Catholic father, the upholder of a pure, robust, cheerful Catholic home, his house renowned as a refuge for the guilty and the unfortunate. He saw a way here which led straight back to innocence. He proposed to Kathleen and she accepted him.
What went wrong? It seemed to him that he was settling down. He found himself a small job in the Civil Service and started work upon his history of the early Irish Church. He published an article, which was lengthily though adversely criticized in The Sword of the Spirit, ent.i.tled "Some Druidic Origins of the Christian Mysteries". He became interested in the struggle between the Irish and the Roman Church which preceded the Council of Whitby. He began to perceive important affinities between the Irish Church and the Eastern Church. Ireland and the East, he proposed to demonstrate, had spoken the pure tongue of the Gospels, preserving a mystical freedom and a spirit of love which were increasingly lost to the over-organized and over-theorized Roman machine. He published a tract called From Athos to Athlone and began to correspond with some very sophisticated French Jesuits who chaffed him about the dangers of heresy. He made a detailed study of the origins of monasticism in Ireland and formed a strong attachment to Saint Brigid, generous, gentle, miraculous saint, and went on devout pilgrimages upon her tracks. He projected a book ent.i.tled The Significance of Brigid as the first volume of his ouvre. It seemed like the good life. Yet during all this time he had not consummated his marriage with Kathleen.
Perhaps it was that after all there was really no short way back to innocence. As soon as he had tied himself to Kathleen, Barney began to feel subdued resentment which had to do both with the priesthood and with Millie. At a conscious reflective level he made out the irrevocable and tedious nature of the marriage bond which linked him to a material, cheated him of a spiritual, destiny; while in the deeper thoughts of his flesh he hopelessly missed Millie and knew it would be sacrilege without zeal to accept a second best. He had missed two absolutes and was left with a compromise. Symbol of two losses, he retained his virginity.
Of course, Kathleen never reproached him, never indeed mentioned his remarkable failure. But of course, too, after a while she began to withdraw. It seemed to him that she had withdrawn slowly, step by step, her eyes fixed upon him, waiting for a sign or gesture which he simply could not make. If he could only, as in the old days, have sought her forgiveness. But he could not. He needed now to defend himself against her, to make fortifications. He began to feel a little afraid of her. He kept formulating and then of course rejecting the theory that she had married him to spite Millie. He formulated more confidently the theory that what she had loved in him was not the whole muddled human person but simply his fallen state. As he put it much later in his Memoir, "Millie loved me because I was a blasphemer, Kathleen loved me because I was a penitent".
He regretted what he had lost, he wished that he had waited. With a curious pain, which was like remorse in reverse, he judged that he had been far too hard on himself at the time of the original fault with Millie. He had exaggerated his guilt. He had been guilty of nothing but inopportunely falling in love. It now began to seem to him that he had done something far worse in marrying Kathleen. He became moody, gave up his job in the excise department, and tried to concentrate on his work on the Irish Church. He spent a great deal of time away from home, ostensibly at the Library, but in fact more and more frequently sitting in bars by himself or with chance acquaintances. Then one day by accident he met Millie in Sackville Street.
She immediately began to laugh. She laughed and laughed while Barney scowled at her sickly. Then she took his arm and said he must come to her house forthwith for a gla.s.s of sherry. He came there and immediately fell at her feet. Extreme love is like certain kinds of conditioning in animals. It exists at a level where there is no such thing as time. Barney was simply back where he was. A few kind words, a touch, from Millie re-established and confirmed his servitude. He did not accuse her of the past but told her in a trembling voice that now, now she must never send him away again. Moved herself, she promised that she would never send him away, that he could always come to her. Carried away, she even expressed a sort of love for him. Perhaps, being older, she was now more appreciative of an absolute devotion. And when Barney began, slightly sobered, to explain that of course he didn"t exactly mean that he was going to leave Kathleen, she began to laugh again, and laughed and shook him until he laughed too. Barney was very happy on that day.
Later times were less happy. He took to frequenting the house at Upper Mount Street. He said nothing to Kathleen about having met Millie and nothing about these visits. He noticed too that Millie, following the instincts of a much-courted woman, quite automatically made a secret of his status with her. When others were present he was merely "a relation"; and indeed most of Millie"s grander friends were in any case incapable of focusing their attention upon so drab a figure. Barney, for his part, watched Millie closely, more closely than she realized, coming with relief to the conclusion that she had no lover. He began to feel a little security in his new life. Christopher Bellman, who knew vaguely of his existence as Millie"s friend, was a man of the world and no gossip. Barney had been shaken, surprised, and rather especially pained at twice meeting Pat Dumay at the house. But he knew of Pat"s morbid reticence. Nothing would reach Kathleen from that quarter.
Kathleen did not know; but Barney"s secret life with Millie took nourishment, took blood, from his existence at home, and Kathleen certainly felt this extra deprivation, this increased rate of emaciation of their common world. And Kathleen, as it seemed to Barney, took perhaps unconsciously her own steps to punish him. Since his re-instatement with Millie, Barney had been less than constant in his attendance at ma.s.s. He had taken no stand with himself, formulated no policy; he just found that, giving this or that explanation to his wife, he just went to church less often. He shunned confession or else went through it in a kind of dream. During this time Kathleen became noticeably more devout. She began to go to ma.s.s daily and, almost ostentatiously, to collect "lame ducks" of all kinds. She spent a lot of time in the poorer parts of Dublin doing strenuous kinds of social work, and became an organizer of a league for helping ex-prisoners. She had never been particularly house-proud, but her attention to the house was now minimal. She was too busy helping people in distress. Her appearance also she neglected, and began to look noticeably shabby, untidy, old. She was often up half the night with her charges and invariably seemed tired. It was as if she had taken over the pastoral function which had once seemed reserved for her husband. She was the priest now.
Barney felt these excesses to be directed against himself. What charm, what beauty, she had had she was now deliberately destroying; and when he saw her trudging along Blessington Street, her shoulders hunched with tiredness and preoccupation, her old unfashionable serge dress bobbing on the pavement, her bulging shopping-bag knocking on the railings, he felt both exasperation and pity, but the pity was the more fleeting of the two. This was her way of being merciless to him. His reaction was a further withdrawal, more drink and more Millie. More of the Mountjoy bar and considerably less of St Joseph"s Church. At the same time he still felt capable of judging himself; things had not yet gone too far. He still had a fairly clear head and could measure where he was. But effectively his repentances took the form of isolated orgies of regret: if only he had not married he could still have conceived of finding a way back into the priesthood. Then he could really have tried to be good, then it would have made sense for him to ask perfection of himself. Well, did it not make sense now? In an ephemeral moment of humility he went to a retreat house. On his return he started to write his Memoir. And he made jokes about the retreat to Millie.
At the same time, with a self-tormenting casuistry, he kept alive the pain of his other total loss. If only he had not been married he could have been so content to be Millie"s fool. Perhaps after all he was not so unlike his father. How much he enjoyed making her laugh! He would be her a.s.s and she should drive him in harness. It was only the nagging thought of Kathleen that spoilt this happiness for him. He started to spend a great deal more time reflecting about himself. The book on the Irish Church began to seem to him a piece of mushy devotional nonsense; or rather, the factual parts now seemed dried up and devoid of interest and the speculative parts seemed pure sentimentality. The whole thing collapsed, went soft; and Barney soon abandoned it and concentrated on the Memoir.
His failures to practise his religion, for which his wife reproached him only by her own increased piety, did not indicate any slackening of the bond which united him to his Church. On the contrary, it seemed to Barney that this bond grew ever closer and more painful. He had so much thought himself into the priesthood and he could not now undo this. He was ordained in his mind and his heart and he had no other profession. He was by vocation a failed priest. Yet it was an almost unlivable vocation. Barney would ask himself: could not even now some miracle of regeneration occur? It seemed as if, all along the way, he had exaggerated his faults, he had despaired too soon: suppose he had turned back then, or then; for what happened later was worse, whereas then it would have been possible to hope. Well, he found himself saying, yet again, was it not still possible to hope? His life was like the Sybil"s leaves; there was always, for the same price, less to salvage. And he followed, as it were at a distance, the yearly cycle of the Church, the pilgrimage of Christ from birth to death. Even now He was drawing near to Calvary. He was riding upon an a.s.s into Jerusalem to die.
"And a very great mult.i.tude spread their garments in the way: others cut down branches from the trees and strewed them in the way. And the mult.i.tudes that went before and that followed cried saying, Hosannah to the Son of David: Blessed is he that cometh in the name of the Lord; Hosannah in the highest. And when He was come into Jerusalem, all the city was moved, saying Who is this?" Who indeed? Barney felt that if he could really believe, even for a moment, in redemption by love he would be instantly, automatically redeemed. He dreamed of being punished and then restored to the flock: when even punishment would fade within that love and be transformed, becoming the spectacle itself of the suffering induced in a pure being by the existence of evil. But for all his cries of Kyrie eleison the faith eluded him that would have made him whole. His self-abas.e.m.e.nt provided a not wholly disagreeable emotional occupation; and not only was there no large change, there was not even the smallest, most momentary change in the pattern of life which he deplored. He was inside, indeed he was, the machine.
Tears started into Barney"s eyes. He had been drinking that afternoon with some friendly bona fides in the Big Tree in Dorset Street. Just lately he had noticed that he was never entirely sober. Tracts of time were blotted out and he was not always sure where the line came between what he had imagined and what was real, what he had intended and what he had done. He recalled with pain the scene of that morning when Millie had abused him in front of his stepson. Unfortunately, that was no dream. He had been cuffed and sent about his business. He felt a physical pain to think that Pat had witnessed this. Barney loved his stepchildren, though feeling rather in awe of both of them. He knew they could not respect him; but it seemed so very sad that therefore his love for them must be wasted and nullified. He had made one effort to draw closer to Pat by joining up with the Volunteers in the early days, and this had gained him one moment of pure pleasure, when Pat had made the discovery that Barney was a good shot. Barney had been moved too by a vague notion that he was going to strike a blow against social injustice. He had long had fantasies of himself as a slum priest defending the poor against the rich. He now proposed to divert his attention from his own sufferings to the sufferings of humanity. But humanity proved too elusive an object and the Volunteers like everything else turned out not to be the answer.
As Barney mused painfully upon his humiliation of that morning he was walking down the hill from the tram in Kingstown, down past the People"s Park, over the mysterious cleft of the railway, towards the sea. Praise be to G.o.d it wasn"t raining, for it was his day for Frances. Every Tuesday Barney met Frances in the afternoon and they walked down the pier and then had tea at O"Halloran"s Bun Shop. Barney looked forward to this time: it was a time of innocence. Barney had a happy relationship with Frances, his only relationship which was not now in some way soured and twisted. Frances was the only person who had always simply loved him. He had known her since she was a child and had got to know her well since her move to Sandycove. He was aware that, for Frances too, he had the fascinating role of a sinner. His religion also fascinated her; and for her he could somehow wear all the complicated tragic finery of his story, although of course she knew none of the details. She sensed the wreckage within and felt compa.s.sion, although there was also something of the self-conscious stooping of the pure young girl toward the fallen man. Frances knew nothing of his relations with Millie, though she had heard the rumour that "some woman" had got him slung out of Maynooth. She was very curious about his past and often tried to draw him on to talk about it. Barney had amused himself by hinting at a liaison with a notable prost.i.tute. Keeping it up, he gave Frances to understand that he had once been a great frequenter of Dublin"s brothels. This idea, which seemed to Barney to have a sort of symbolic truth, gave a certain thrill both to him and to the girl.
Barney had known from long ago, as everybody had, that Frances was destined to marry his nephew Andrew. He used to feel pleased about this as it represented an inclusion of Frances more closely in the family. But now that the time for the marriage had drawn so very near he had other feelings. He guessed that Andrew intended to take Frances to England. There Barney could not go. He too much needed, not only to see Millie, but also almost superst.i.tiously in the intervals of seeing her, to watch her. Now the withdrawal of Frances seemed suddenly to abandon him to the devices of nightmare. Frances had been a source of light. There was also, Barney was surprised to find, an element of pure jealousy in his att.i.tude to this marriage. He was fond of his nephew, but he simply did not want him to have Frances. This was an absurd thought, from which Barney rapidly switched to edifying pictures of dear old Uncle Barnabas, grown curiously ancient and sagelike, dandling little children upon his knee. This sometimes worked. But he was now very unhappy about Frances.
It was a windy day. The wind pursued spherical golden and black cloudlets through a yellowish sky over Kingstown and out towards the soft hazy bands of more slowly shifting sea-cloud which always lay upon the horizon like a distant range of hills. The sea would be rough. Barney could see it ahead of him now, a cold and scaly green with flecks of white. He reached the bottom of the hill and entered the gloomy patch of vegetation known as the Crocks" Garden. This consisted of paths of blackish earth which trailed about between the thick clumps of veronica bushes which clothed the slope down to the sea: a sad place which had seemed a labyrinth of mystery to him when he had been young. Below it the waves roared on to a little muddy beach of green untidy stones and foamed along a broken breakwater which had seemed to the youthful Barney like some piece of Roman antiquity. Beyond, like a strange yellow coastline, stretched the great rocky arm of the pier, on this side of which, hollow and majestic as Egyptian temples to the eyes of the child, rose two stone shelters wherein he had spent many happy hours of his holidays watching the rain falling interminably into the sea.
Barney now took the way past the shelters before climbing up on to the top of the pier where he was to meet Frances. The shelters, whose speckled stony concrete looked like living rock, had been decorated, as usual, by small posters which the Royal Irish Constabulary had not yet had time to remove. England"s Last Ditch. Pretence of the Realm Act. Fight for Catholic Ireland not for Catholic Belgium. Barney pa.s.sed by and climbed up to the top where he could pa.s.s through the thick wall to the harbour side of the pier. He looked back for a moment as a touch of sun illumined the multicoloured stucco fronts of the marine terraces, and behind them the two tall rival spires of Kingstown, Catholic and Protestant, shifting constantly in their relation to each other except when from the Martello tower at Sandycove they could be seen superimposed.
The pier itself, upon which he now set foot, had always seemed to Barney an object ancient and numinous, like some old terraced Ziggurat, composed of immense rocks of yellow granite and scarcely raised by human labour: something "built by the hands of giants for G.o.d-like kings of old". Its two great arms, ending in lighthouse fortresses, enclosed a vast s.p.a.ce of gently rolling indigo water and a miscellany of craft riding at anchor. The inner side of the pier was terraced and decorated at intervals by strange stone edifices, wind towers and obelisks and great cubes with doors, which made it seem all the more like some pagan religious monument. Beyond were the waters of Dublin Bay, now a harsh streaky blue, the outskirts of Dublin to the left, a purplish ma.s.s in the uncertain light, the dark low line of Clontarf and the rising hump of Howth. Barney noticed uneasily that it appeared to be raining on Howth. But then it was always raining on Howth.
And there was the dear girl herself down below, waving and hurrying on towards him.
"Are you all right, Barney?"
"Oh, all right, struggling along. A bit battered, you know, a bit battered. But struggling along."
Frances always asked this question and Barney always gave this sort of answer. That anxious "Are you all right?" of Frances was perhaps the nearest he ever got to a token of the love for which his heart craved.
Frances was wearing a mackintosh cape and motoring hood, and a tartan pleated skirt which swirled about her ankles. She took a firm grip upon the skirt as she walked, gathering several of the pleats carefully between her fingers. They set off along the pier in silence, mounting again to the upper terrace where a gleam of sunshine made the powerful stones a chilly sandy gold. They did not always talk then. The wind often made talking impossible.
"What"s that, Frances?"
"I just said there"s the mail boat."
"Why, so it is."
"How very clear and bright its colours are in the sun though it"s still so far away. Which one is it?"
"The Hibernia." From long experience Barney could tell the almost identical boats apart. He hardly knew how he did it. He added. "She"s late. There must have been a U-boat alert."
"How awfully frightened they must be."
"You mean the pa.s.sengers-"
"No, the Germans down in the U-boats. It must be terrible."
It had never occurred to Barney to feel sorry for the Germans down in the U-boats. But of course Frances was right, it must be terrible. His thoughts reverted to himself. With a perverse desire to cause himself pain he said to Frances, "You"ll be off on the mail boat one of these days."
"What?"
"I said you"ll be off on the mail boat one of these days."
"Why?"
"I mean, young Andrew will take you; I mean, when you"re married."
Frances was silent.
"When will you be married?" said Barney. He had put off asking Frances this question, he did not want to know, it would be horrible to know.
"I"m not sure, Barney, Andrew hasn"t actually fixed anything yet, and until-"
"Oh well, he"ll fix it soon. He"ll have to before he- He"s a lucky boy." Some people have all the luck, Barney thought. Why had he not grown up with a dear lovely girl just holding out her arms and waiting for him?
Frances thrust her arm through Barney"s and they forged ahead together against the wind. "Well, even then you know, I probably wouldn"t leave Ireland-"
"Yes, you would. You know Andrew hates Ireland."
She squeezed his arm in comfort or protest and they went on for a while in silence. When they got as far as one of the "temples", a square stone hut with a pediment, surmounted by three iron cups which whirled chasing each other with desperate speed, they stopped for a moment to give their whipped glowing faces a rest from the wind, and leaned back against the great wall of the pier. The sun had gone in now and the landward clouds had turned to a bright pewter grey. The spires of Kingstown rose blackened as if dipped into some infusion of darkness, but a mysterious glow lit the terraces of houses and reflected light gleamed in the windows. Beyond, the mountains were almost black save where the sun fell very far away upon a slope of rusty green. Barney began to try to light his pipe.
"Are you still in the Volunteers, Barney?"
"I suppose so. I haven"t actually resigned. But I"ve rather fallen out of things lately."
Frances was silent for a while, looking towards Kingstown. The spire of the Mariners" Church emerged from its veil of darkness and shone a silvery grey.
She said suddenly, "I can"t think why it doesn"t all blow up."
"What?"
"Oh, I don"t know-I mean society, everything. Why do the poor people put up with us? Why do the men go and fight in that stupid ghastly war? Why don"t they all say, no, no, no?"
"I agree with you, Frances. It"s extraordinary what people will put up with. But they just feel helpless. What can they do? What can any of us do?"
"People shouldn"t feel helpless. Something ought to be done. I saw today by Stephen"s Green-I was in town this morning -oh, it was so sad-a girl, a mother, she must have been my age, with clothes, well they weren"t clothes, just jumbled bits of stuff, and four little children, all of them barefoot, and she was begging, and the little kids were sort of dressed up like little monkeys, and trying to dance, and they were crying all the time-"
"I expect they were hungry."
"Well, it"s scandalous, wicked, and a society which allows it deserves to be blown to bits."
"But dearest Frances, you must have seen girls like that girl a hundred times. Dublin is full of them."
"Yes, I know, and that"s awful. One gets used to it. I"ve just been thinking more about it lately. It shouldn"t be. And I can"t think why they don"t attack us, jump on us like wild animals, instead of just humbly holding out their hands for a penny."
Barney agreed with her that it shouldn"t be. But after all what could one do? The begging mother, the starving children, the men in the trenches, the Germans down in the U-boats. It was mad and a tragic world. Now if he had been a priest- "Barney, do you think there"ll be any trouble in Ireland?"
"You mean fighting here?"
"Yes, about Home Rule and so on."
"No, of course not. Home Rule will come automatically after the war."
"So there"s nothing to fight about, is there?"
"Nothing at all."
"And any way, Father was saying they have no arms. They can"t fight."
"No, they can"t."
"Barney, what will Home Rule do for that woman begging in the street?"
Barney thought for a moment. "Absolutely nothing."
"It won"t really touch that level of people at all?"
"Well, they"ll have the pleasure of being exploited by P. Flanagan instead of J. Smith."
"Then the thing"s not worth fighting for anyway."
"Wait a minute. It"s worth having one"s national freedom," said Barney. He felt a bit vague about it. "Once Ireland"s free of England it"ll be easier to set the house in order."