by Iris Murdoch
He had known that the surrender of the rifle would be painful for him, but he had not foreseen that it would be like a mutilation. At that moment the Lee Enfield seemed like an extension of himself. He could not sever it, he could not thrust it into one of those appalling caves and let it go. He felt that he might perish himself at the moment of release. The prospect was like a descent into madness. He pitied the rifle, he loved it. He could not surrender a part of himself to that evil howling power. He got up hastily and went through the gap and began to run back along the pier clasping the rifle against his chest.
He went on running with occasional gasping pauses until he got as far as the Crock’s Garden. The misty rain had receded momentarily and the sea was a blackish blue scattered with points of light. There was a luminous pallor at the horizon. Overhead the sky was suddenly clear and a weak yellow sun shone on to the Crock’s Garden. Barney had again that sense of dream, of belonging to another dimension from the people about him, of taking part in a ritual. Only before he had felt himself the glad master of his steps. Now, in some mysterious enactment into which he had not been initiated, he was being conveyed along.
There were a few people sitting gloomily in their mackintoshes upon the wet seats of the garden looking at the sea. Barney took one of the labyrinthine paths which wound uphill between the thick round veronica bushes. He felt now that he must get rid of the rifle as quickly as possible. If he kept the thing in his hands much longer some doom would fall upon him. He looked quickly about. There was no one to be seen. He thrust the long brown paper parcel far in under one of the bushes and out of sight. Then he walked quickly on till he came to a seat at the top of the hill and sat down.
He was panting with exertion and excitement. He stared at the Martello tower at Sandycove, caught in a grey luminous shaft of sunny rainy light. After a few minutes he thought he would go again and look at where the rifle was. Perhaps after all he should now simply pick it up and go back to Dublin on the tram. He had performed the movements of an act of penance. It was all symbolic anyhow. It’s all in my mind, he said to himself. Could he remember under which bush he had put the gun? He started off down the hill, panting again. But several elderly ladies were now coming up the winding path. He returned to the seat at the top. It was raining now in Sandycove and the Martello tower was almost obscured. He waited three minutes and then began to descend the hill again.
He turned the corner of the path and saw a group of people beside a bush. Some children had already found the rifle and pulled it out on to the path. The paper was being unwrapped. Someone was saying confusedly to someone else that hadn’t a policeman better be called. Barney pushed quickly past and went down the hill. He expected at any moment to be called back and accused of something. Then it suddenly began to rain extremely hard. Everyone started to run. Barney ran.
He ran toward the nearest of the big Egyptian temples, the concrete shelter upon the near end of the pier. The rain was spilling down, beating violently upon the heads of the running people. It stretched away in front of him like a series of bright metal curtains. Just as he reached the shelter he heard somebody call his name. An umbrella jerked against his shoulder. Underneath the umbrella he saw the pale face of Kathleen.
Barney slithered into the damp gloom of the shelter. There were a lot of people already there and others arriving in haste. Kathleen followed him in, closing her umbrella. They made their way into a corner.
The sudden appearance of his wife did not surprise Barney very much. In his present weird state of mind it seemed to him natural that Kathleen should materialize since she had been in a sense the spiritual agent of whatever it was that had just been happening to him. She was a performer in the same ritual and perhaps its directing genius. However, he asked her, ‘How did you know I was here?’ It seemed natural too that she should have been out looking for him.
‘I asked you when you were leaving the house where you were going and you said Kingstown Pier.’
‘Oh. I’d forgotten.’
‘I came to look for Christopher really, but there was no one at Finglas, so I came down here in case you might be here with Frances and she might know where Christopher was.’
‘It’s not my day for Frances.’ So Kathleen had not been looking for him after all. ‘Would you like to sit down? It’s terribly wet.’
Kathleen spread out a newspaper on the rough concrete seat at the back of the shelter and they sat down. Behind them out of holes in the wall a little water trickled over the pebbly surface. The dreary damp smell of wet concrete mingled with a human smell of wet tweed. A large number of persons were standing up just in front of them, hemming them in, and steaming slightly in the sudden closeness. Their voices echoed in the hollow space.
Barney suddenly felt that he and Kathleen were very private here at the back of the crowd, sitting together in the dark. He felt a desire to touch her, to pat her knee, but felt too shy to do so. A moment later he decided that he must make his confession. The sacrifice of the rifle had worked. ‘Kathleen—’
‘Barney, I’m so worried—’
‘Listen, Kathleen, I must tell you something. I’ve got to tell you now and it’ll make everything all right again between us. I know it’ll upset you, but it’s right to tell the truth isn’t it and won’t you forgive me for it? It’s about Millie, well it’s about me really, but there are two things and one of them is about Millie, that I’ve been going to see Millie still. You didn’t know that, did you? Well, for ages now I’ve been going to see her at her house, just to talk like, but it was very wrong and I’m very sorry and I won’t go there any more at all. And the other thing is about Saint Brigid, I mean about the early church that I’m supposed to be writing. I haven’t been writing it at all but I’ve been writing another thing a sort of autobiography thing about you and me in a way I shouldn’t but I’ll stop doing that too and—’
‘Saint Brigid?’ said Kathleen. Perhaps she could not hear very well in the crowded echoing shelter.
‘I say I’m not writing about Saint Brigid but about you and me in a sort of Memoir like I shouldn’t have been. But did you hear what I said about Millie?’
‘Don’t talk so loudly. I can hear you quite well. You mustn’t talk like that here.’
‘But did you hear?’
‘Yes. I knew you went to see Millie.’
‘Oh. Well and wasn’t it wrong of me to?’
‘I still don’t understand what it has to do with Saint Brigid.’
‘That’s another thing, I’m doing two wrong things but they’re not connected, forget about Saint Brigid, it’s just that all the time I’ve been at the National Library I’ve been writing that thing about you and me, and—’
‘Sure, why shouldn’t you?’
Barney had often imagined himself making this confession to Kathleen, but it had been in a scene quite unlike this one. He had pictured himself shaken by emotion, the words rent from his breast. He had pictured Kathleen’s stricken face, perhaps her tears, her bitter reproaches, and then the great reconciliation. But this was as random and senseless as the sea roaring through the rocks.
‘Barney, I’m so worried—’
The people in front of them suddenly surged forward. There were exclamations, ‘It’s stopped.’ The sun was shining outside. Everyone started to troop out of the shelter.
Barney and Kathleen got up automatically. Kathleen began to pull pieces of damp newspaper off her coat, and Barney pawed at the seat of his trousers which felt very uncomfortable indeed. Automatically they walked out towards the sun.
The sunshine was warm and fragrant after the chill atmosphere of the shelter. The wind had dropped and the sea below them was a thick glassy green. The people dispersed along the promenade whose drenched surface steamed in the sun. Kathleen started to speak again, but before Barney could hear what she was saying they both saw, with a sudden dismayed premonition, someone running towards them. There was a sort of explosion and Cathal arrived, cannoning into Barney an
d saving himself by grasping him violently round the waist. The boy was in a state of incoherent excitement.
‘Pat wants you,’ he said to Barney, and had to say it twice because the words got all mixed up.
‘Whatever is it, Cathal?’ said Kathleen, her hands at her mouth with fright.
‘I knew you were coming down here and I told Pat I could find you at once and he says you’re to report to him directly so come now.’
‘Cathal, what is it?’
Cathal turned to his mother. He was almost tearful with emotion. ‘We’re going to fight them now. We’re going to take over Dublin tomorrow.’
He darted away, receding along the wet promenade, dodging the people who were standing about enjoying the sunshine. Kathleen ran after him awkwardly, her half-closed umbrella underneath her arm. Barney ran after Kathleen.
Chapter Seventeen
‘PAT, Pat, let me in!’
Pat groaned. He had hoped to avoid seeing his mother. He had intended indeed to be out of the house entirely that day, but it had been necessary to come back to destroy some documents and to remove a copy of his will which he wished to leave with a solicitor. He had also wanted to interview Barney about a particular matter. And now he was caught.
When he had noticed on the previous day that the door of his room had been forced he had immediately thought of the police, but Cathal had then appeared and told him what had happened. Kathleen, after searching his room, had gone away in great agitation saying she was going to see Christopher, and had returned rather more calm later in the afternoon. She had said nothing to either of her sons.
Pat, who had jammed a tilted chair against the door handle so that the door could not be opened from the outside, said, ‘All right, Mother, I’ll come down in a moment.’ Her steps receded.
Pat stamped on the smouldering ash in the grate and thrust the copy of the will into the pocket of his green jacket. The other copy was in the unlocked drawer of his desk. All his papers were neat and in order, the room bared and tidied, already unfamiliar. He looked about him. He would not come back that night. Perhaps he would not come back at all.
The authority of tomorrow had made him by now utterly hard and quiet. He had received his final orders and now knew as much as he would know until the firing of the first shot. To his profound joy he had been appointed to be at the centre of the conflict at headquarters, with Pearse and MacDonagh in the General Post Office. He closed the door and went down to his mother.
‘Pat, what is this about tomorrow?’
He looked at his mother coldly down the length of the long narrow drawing-room. It seemed to be raining again outside and he could not see her face very well. ‘Do sit down, Mother, and take your coat off. You seem to have got soaked.’
‘Pat, what are you going to do? They’ve planned an armed rising for tomorrow, I know it, so don’t pretend. What are you going to do?’
Pat decided there was no point in a denial. ‘How did you find out?’
‘Cathal told me.’
‘Damn Cathal.’ Pat had of course not told his brother anything of the plan. Cathal must have found it out from someone at Liberty Hall. The Citizen Army men had always encouraged Cathal, treating him as if he were grown up.
‘So it is true. And you are going to be in it.’
‘I’m going to be where every decent Irishman will be on that day.’
‘I would do anything to stop you,’ said Kathleen in a low gruff voice, uttering every word with an effort.
‘Fortunately there is nothing you can do.’
‘I could reveal everything to the Castle.’
‘That would not stop us from fighting. It would merely increase our chances of defeat. It’s too late. There is nothing whatever that you can do, Mother.’
Kathleen slowly took off her wet coat and let it fall to the floor. ‘And if I beg and implore you not to—’
‘My dear mother, your disapproval is not likely to weigh with me very much at this stage.’
‘Not my disapproval, my misery—’
‘Or your misery either. I thought of all these things long ago. Be sensible now. Would you really be pleased to have a son who kept out of danger for the sake of his mother’s tears? I’m sorry to cause you pain, but I know where my duty lies.’
‘It can’t be your duty,’ she said. ‘It can’t be. What’s wrong can’t be your duty.’
‘It’s not wrong to fight to free your country.’
‘But you won’t be doing that. You’ll just be killing people pointlessly. You’ll have innocent blood on your hands. And you may be killed yourself or maimed for life. That’s what it will be. And what for? Think about later on, think when people will look back and see that nothing has been changed. You cannot change Ireland by firing a few shots. Don’t you see? Nothing can be done in this way at all. All that great action is in your mind only. You’ll commit crimes and you’ll destroy yourself utterly and break my heart, and for nothing. Can’t you see it all from that place in the future and see that it’s for nothing?’
‘I don’t inhabit that place in the future, Mother, and neither do you. This is the moment when Ireland has got to fight and she’s come to it over a long road.’
‘She! She! Who is Ireland indeed? Are you and your friends Ireland? You use these grand jumped-up words, but they mean nothing at all. They’re empty words. You’re caught all of you in the tangle of your dreams and it just needs a few sane men to halt you. Have you not the courage to stop this thing?’
‘It’s too late to argue.’
‘And what about Cathal?’
Pat was silent.
‘Have you thought about your young brother in this? Have you the right to destroy him too?’
‘We’ll keep Cathal out of it.’
‘And how will you do that? You know he’ll go wherever you go. Are we to tie him up or what?’
‘No one will let him do anything, he’s too young.’
‘Who’ll trouble about his age? Those fellows of James Connolly’s he’s always about with will take him with them if you don’t.’
‘I’ll manage about Cathal.’
‘Pat, child, please don’t go. You must have some influence with these men. Put it off at any rate, think a little longer. You know you haven’t got a chance against the English, sure you all know you haven’t a chance. MacNeill must know that. He’s not a madman.’
‘It’s not the point whether we have a chance.’
‘You’re going out there to be killed for nothing, to die for nothing.’
‘It won’t be for nothing. If I die I shall die for Ireland.’
‘There is no such thing as dying for Ireland,’ she said.
There was a heavy sound of running feet upon the stairs and along the landing, and as they both turned quickly towards the door it burst open and Christopher Bellman rushed into the room.
* * * *
‘Kathleen, would you mind leaving me alone with Pat for a few minutes?’
Kathleen said, ‘They are going to fight tomorrow.’ She went to the door.
‘Tomorrow is it?’ Christopher stared at Pat. He waited for Kathleen to be gone and then strode forward and gripped Pat’s arms above the elbow. He shook Pat with a violence which was half affection and half anger and then suddenly, closing his eyes and baring his teeth, he dropped his hands and turned away. ‘Tomorrow? Oh God, you fools, you fools, you fools. You haven’t heard what’s happened down in Kerry?’
‘What?’
‘Your precious German arms. A whole shipload of them. Now they’re at the bottom of Queenstown harbour. Oh, you idiots, you dolts—But tomorrow—Pat, you’re mad.’
‘What’s this about German arms?’
‘You didn’t know? A ship crammed with arms for you from Germany—God knows how they did it—I heard it all from MacNeill—got through the blockade—they were disguised as Norwegian fishermen or something—got as far as Tralee harbour—and there they sat for nearly two days waiting for some of yo
ur people to pay some attention to them! God, how can you have been so stupid? The Germans do this absolutely marvellous thing for you and you have to muff it. Why, why, why didn’t somebody get those arms ashore? But no one seems even to have noticed the wretched Germans! God, what were your people thinking of? And then they felt they had to move and they sailed a bit along the coast and ran smack into a British sloop which took them into Queenstown harbour. Even then the Germans were beautiful, beautiful—the captain got everyone off and blew his ship up under the nose of the Royal Navy! My God, the Germans know how to do things. But they might have known the Irish would mess up their end of it. All that stuff sitting in Tralee bay and no one there to land it! God, what a nation of dunces!’
