by Iris Murdoch
‘It’s wicked and insane what you say. Why should Ireland be really independent? How can she be really independent? Ireland’s honour means nothing but the vanity of a few murderous men.’
‘Well, you argue like a woman. If you like I’ll certainly see Pat and try to find out something. But I do assure you there’s nothing in it. I know the MacNeills and I’d have heard if anything was in the air. These plans you saw are just for the usual routine manœuvres.’
Kathleen stood up. She looked down at Christopher with eyes big and dazed with thought. ‘I wonder if I ought to tell the Castle.’
‘What?’
‘If the Castle knew now they could circumvent them, they could take their arms away.’
‘Kathleen, are you mad? That would certainly be the way to start a fight! Anyway, the Castle wouldn’t believe you any more than I do. And it would be such, well, treachery. Do you want to break Pat’s heart?’
‘I don’t want to lose both my sons.’
‘Cathal’s only in the Fianna! No one’s going to give him a gun!’
‘He’d follow Pat anywhere and it would be impossible to stop him.’
‘No, no, Kathleen, do stop worrying. All this is in your imagination. Now I must take you back to the house or Hilda will be cross. Anyway it’s starting to rain. Have I convinced you you’re wrong to worry?’
‘Well—perhaps—’
‘Good. But I will talk to Pat. And I’ll use logic with him; oh, I’ll use logic!’
Chapter Sixteen
IT was Saturday afternoon. Barney had enveloped his Lee Enfield rifle in a long roll of brown paper and was binding it around with twine. He had at last come to a decision.
When it had seemed to him, at his moment of illumination in the Dominican chapel, that if he were simply to lift a finger he would gain a great access of spiritual strength, he had not foreseen how difficult the lifting of his finger would prove to be. He had returned home in the early hours of Good Friday moving in a spiritual rapture which seemed as intense and as pure as his numinous experience at Clonmacnoise. He was resolved on three things: to stop seeing Millie, to confess everything to Kathleen, and to destroy the Memoir. He had lain down and slept, in anticipation, the sleep of the just.
Later on on Friday, and this morning, it had all appeared less simple. The thought of not seeing Millie any more was not just painful it was absurd. It now seemed morbidly gratuitous, like punishing himself for nothing. He might go and see Millie less often, but the difference between less often and never was the difference between sanity and madness. To drop Millie would be a pointless act of self-mutilation. His little visits to her did no harm. It was all in his mind. Yes, that was it, it was all in his mind. He did no real harm to Kathleen by cheering himself up with Millie; on the contrary, he was a more kindly person at home just because he had this consolation. The idea of making a general confession to Kathleen now also seemed somehow an unnecessary penance. He would upset Kathleen, he would upset himself; and anyway Kathleen probably understood the essence of the matter already. To set it out crudely in words was just to make extra trouble. It would not make things simple and innocent, it would make them nasty, emotional and complicated. He had much better keep quiet and try hard, within the structure of his life as it now again seemed to him that it had to be, to be a better husband to Kathleen. Didn’t that make sense? Yet he felt, with all this, disappointed. He knew in some refined pinpoint of his heart that what he had glimpsed in the chapel was true and was far more important than the reasoning which could make such nonsense of it. The trouble was that his quick vision of the truth was not commensurable with any plan of action which suited his capabilities. The acts it enjoined now seemed, not necessary, but isolated, arbitrary and senseless. He had no energy for them. Sure, it’s all in my mind, he came back to saying.
The conclusion he had reached about his Memoir, that it was a sin against his wife, had seemed, even late on Friday night, both more clearly right and more practically manageable. He knew, as soon as he started to reflect seriously on the matter at all, that the Memoir provided a continual source of bitterness against Kathleen. He was not really soberly and before God trying to write down what was the truth of their relationship, he was deploying an elaborate private argument against her. He was using his intelligence simply to take her captive in the imagination and belittle her, and correspondingly to enlarge himself. He was the wise, detached, shrewd observer, ironical and invulnerable. This must stop. If he was going to lead, even in a rather modified way, a new life, he must destroy the Memoir and blot out from his mind the picture of Kathleen which it contained.
He took out the manuscript and opened it at random. ‘I observed with sorrow the progressive estrangement of my wife from her two sons. On one or two occasions I even felt bound to upbraid the boys separately for an “off-hand” treatment of their mother which amounted almost to rudeness. They heard my admonitions with respect but seemed unable to promise any amelioration. It was clear that their mother afflicted them, as she afflicted so many people, with an uneasiness similar in structure to a sense of guilt. That this was not “true” guilt it took me indeed some years to perceive. A prolonged study of my wife’s character led me in the end to conclude that the phenomenon was caused, not by any moral superiority on her part, but by something much more simple, her curious lack of vitality. She was, in the end, one of those who “have not” and from whom therefore, in the harsh words of the Gospel, “shall be taken away even that which they have”. There was a negative quality in her, an un-life, in the presence of which ordinary healthy persons, such as myself and my step-sons, quite perceptibly shuddered.’
The trouble was, it was so dashedly well written; and it was the only thing he had ever really created. It seemed a pity just to tear it up, in fact it seemed rather a crime. The Memoir existed now in its own right as a sort of personality, and the violent physical act of destroying it would seem like a murder and surely quite a needless one. He would stop writing it of course. Well, it was almost finished anyway. Perhaps he would just quickly finish it and put it away. And in case anyone ever found it he would write at the bottom in large letters all this is not quite true. Or perhaps one day he might change all the names and turn it into a novel.
He reached this conclusion on Saturday morning, and after reaching it, feeling distinctly more cheerful, he went out to the Reading Room in Lord Edward Street and looked at the newspapers and thought about Frances. If he had decided, which he had not, to give up Millie it would have simplified the decision whether to tell Frances about Christopher since, as he would have lost Millie anyway, he would not have to fear her displeasure nor would he have to worry about the purity of his motives. But given that he was still aiming at the preservation of Millie not only from herself but for himself, if Millie knew that Barney had told Frances that Christopher… He decided that he would read the newspapers first and think about all this afterwards.
There were two articles in the newspapers which interested him. The first one, which was in the Irish Volunteer, gave an account of how to ambush your enemy at a crossroads. Suppose you have forty men, armed with five rifles, twenty shotguns, fifteen pikes, and as many revolvers or automatics. Find a reasonably high wall and build up a footing behind it and put sandbags on top with loop-holes between. Know your left-hand shots and where to place them. For yourself, if you use a revolver or pistol with lance or bayonet, practise shooting with your left hand. Keep open your lines of communication and retreat. Throw up a barricade on the road in front, always on the right side of a bend so as not to be visible to an enemy till he comes right up to it. Do not put men behind it. Place the shot-gun men and the pike men behind hedges at the side. When the column comes down the road hold your fire until it is well into range; while it is thrown into confusion by fire let your pike men charge through it and back; then another volley.
It sounded easy. Barney liked reading things like that in the Volunteer and feeling that they were meant f
or men like himself. ‘Know your left-hand shots and where to place them.’ He would know. ‘Practise shooting with your left hand.’ Left-hand shooting was child’s play to him. Being an expert marksman had always made him feel himself to be an honorary soldier. Yet he had never in fact joined the Territorials nor had he been distinguished either for zeal or performance in the Volunteers, although he was respected as a crack shot by the younger men. Perhaps after all he had not got a soldier’s temperament. He read the instructions for the ambush over again. Could he really imagine himself there? ‘Hold your fire…. Let your pike men charge…then another volley.’ He had seen men training with pikes though he had never handled one himself. What would it be like to thrust one of those things into a human body? ‘Then another volley.’ He pictured the men lying in the road, some lying still, some twisting and crying out. Could he be there? He closed the Volunteer with a shudder. The Irish spent so much of their time imagining what they would do to the English once they got hold of them. Perhaps these fancies really were, as Kathleen thought them, a poison of the imagination, a corruption of the heart.
He next opened the Irish Times and started reading an article, reprinted from the New York Times, by Bernard Shaw called ‘Irish Nonsense about Ireland’. Shaw was at his usual game of deriding Irish nationalism. ‘I invite America to contemplate the spectacle of a few manifesto-writing stalwarts from the decimated population of a tiny green island at the back of Godspeed, claiming its national right to confront the world with its own army, its own fleet, its own tariff, and its own language which not five per cent of its population could speak or read or write even if they wanted to…. If Ireland were cut loose from the British fleet and army to-morrow she would have to make a present of herself the day after to the United States, or France, or Germany, or any big Power that would condescend to accept her: England for preference.’
Of course, Shaw was right. Could Ireland stand alone? No, of course she couldn’t. No little nation could stand alone in these days. And it was true, as Shaw said later in the article, that Ireland’s first natural ally was England. Barney had heard the exalted talk of his stepsons, had heard Pat speak of a transfigured Ireland that would shine in the eyes of the nations, had heard Cathal tell how a magnanimous Ireland would raise a defeated England from the dust. But these were dreams. Ireland would always be the half potty second-rate provincial dump which it had always been, with its stupid clergy and its stupid poor. It was not worth shedding men’s blood, sticking them through with pikes or knocking them off with shot-guns at country cross-roads, to try to change what could never really be changed.
And yet was Shaw entirely right? All over Europe men had fought savagely for their freedom in scenes just as petty and hopeless as the Irish scene. Was it a bad thing that they had done this, and not chaffered rationally with their local tyrants for a slightly better bargain? Like almost all the Anglo-Irish, Barney had a strong peppering of Irish patriotism in his blood. He felt what it was like to belong to the persecuted and the broken though he himself had never suffered hunger or blows. The history of Ireland was such a tale of misery and wretchedness, enough to make the angels howl and stamp their golden feet. England had destroyed Ireland slowly and casually, without malice, without mercy, practically without thought, like someone who treads upon an insect, forgets it, then sees it quivering and treads upon it again. Was there under heaven no tribunal where such a wrong could be set right and where the voices of the starved dead could mount into a mighty tempest at last? Were the young men wrong to imagine that an Ireland set free by its own righteous anger would be an unimaginably different place?
What could he do? As his thoughts returned to himself, taking him unawares, he felt a familiar pain which was his timeless assumption that he was a priest and then the quick jolt of the truth. He might, for all the horrors of the crossroads, endorse the fighting of others. He could not fight himself. His battles were battles of the spirit, his only task his own regeneration. And then as he remembered again the pure yet untranslatable summons of the little light which shone so withdrawn and self-contained in the thickness of the dark, he suddenly realized what the thing was which he could do for Kathleen. He could sacrifice his rifle.
The one clear idea which had remained with Barney from his spiritual half-hour in the Dominican chapel was that he ought to act. He ought to do something. He ought to lift his finger. He ought, as he put it to himself, to give God a chance. He should shake himself into performing some movement which might be just violent enough to let loose the avalanche of goodness which he had, in that dazed but indubitable encounter, apprehended as reserved in especial for his own address. But there seemed after all to be no action which he could perform. He had decided that at least he could go and visit poor Jinny at the ‘little hell’ and bring her a present. But Kathleen had told him that Jinny had gone back to her parents in County Meath. So even that little decent act was taken from him. There was nothing left except lighting a candle in a church and resolving to be more polite to his wife. Was that all that had come of such an overwhelming sense of the presence of the Almighty?
The idea of sacrificing his Lee Enfield suddenly seemed the perfect solution. It was something that would cause him pain. It was something that would please Kathleen and win her approval. She had said that she wanted that rifle out of the house. It was a gesture that would symbolize a return to a purer and simpler life. Guns and uniforms were all very well for young ones like Pat and Cathal who were not dedicated men, but he had much better stay away and purge his imagination utterly of these pictures of violence. He must become a man of peace, asking little, harming no one. And he felt in an almost superstitious way that if he could undertake this positive penance this might indeed be the lifting of the finger, the joining of action to good intent from which a whole sequence of improvement might follow.
But how was he to get rid of the rifle? It seemed improper and insufficiently dramatic to sell it or give it away, he could not destroy it bodily and could scarcely leave it on a tram. Again the answer came to him as if from a divine source: he must take it to Kingstown Pier and cast it down a hole in the rocks! Feeling himself once more a man guided and inspired, he ate a hearty meal of sausages at the Red Bank Restaurant and then returned to Blessington Street and tied up the Lee Enfield into a brown-paper parcel.
* * * *
It was an extremely cold day and there was nobody about on the front at Kingstown. Holding his parcel cradled in front of him like a child, Barney began to walk along the pier. The sharpened wind blew into his face and brought tears. He felt, with his strange burden, like a man dressed for a part, one garbed for a Passion-tide procession who by back streets makes his way toward the Cathedral. Yesterday Christ had been crucified. Today He lay in the tomb. Tomorrow He would rise victorious over death. Barney felt, as never before, that he was a part of that mystery. His instinct had been right. An action, even a mad arbitrary action, was needed to break the spell of his despair and set free the promised grace. Penance, sacrifice, these were symbolic movements whose effects were incommensurable in the world of the spirit. His single act would bring the full circle of his reconciliation. God who had asked for Isaac had also sent the ram.
He had gone about a third of the way along the pier on the upper terrace. There was nobody about. He approached one of the gaps in the wall through which one could pass to the other side. The wind screamed in the aperture. In a drenching of spray Barney went through and shuffled sideways with his back to the wall facing the open sea. The sea was extremely rough. It roared into the mountainous random rocks in a break-neck surge which creamed almost as far as Barney’s feet and was withdrawn with an equal ferocity, sucked back through holes and crevasses to howl in chambers far below, vanishing in boiling foam under the high dissolving front of the next wave. In a mist of spray Barney gazed, wondering which was more horrible, the huge savage sea or the piled rocks with their shapeless crannies. He found suddenly that he had to sit down against the wall
.
A veil of rain farther out concealed Howth and even Sandycove from view. There was nothing ahead of him except that line of great glistening light yellow rocks stretching away on either side on which a sort of diffused sunshine fell, and the rolling backs of the waves, dark grey, almost black, coming steadily towards him out of the wall of rain. Barney sat with the salt trickling upon his face and stared, stared at a manifestation of something far older and more primitive than the god who today lay sleeping in the quiet tomb and tomorrow would rise out of a casket of daffodils and lilies.
He could not think why he was so affected by the sea. After all he had seen rough seas before. Or perhaps it was something to do with the rocks. He had always hated and feared those rocks; and now perhaps catching him in this rarefied, this spiritual condition they were suddenly able to get at him. He closed his eyes to blot them out for a moment and to collect his strength. The din of the sea inside his head, the clatter of Chaos and Old Night, dulled into a ghastly replica of silence and he almost feared to fall into a drugged perilous slumber. He opened his eyes quickly and began to look about for a suitable hole or crevice down which to drop the Lee Enfield. There were plenty of huge triangles of blackness between the rocks into which the broken waves drained and echoed away. Once thrust in there and released from the hand the rifle would slip away into some other world. It would not just disappear, it would cease to be. Barney sat still for a while. Then he began to wipe the spray slowly off his face with a handkerchief. He had realized that he could not do it.
