by Iris Murdoch
‘I’m not arguing. I’m telling you what you are going to do.’
‘You’re not my da. You used to beat me when you were stronger, but I’m just as strong now, and if I decide to go out of that door you can’t stop me.’
‘You know perfectly well I can stop you with one hand. Cathal, be sensible—’
‘I’m not going to obey you and I am going to fight tomorrow. Imagine you were me. Would you stay at home because your elder brother told you you were a little boy?’
Pat was silent. His head swayed. He must keep on talking. What was the next step? Logic. ‘In that case,’ said Pat, ‘you’ll have to stay a prisoner.’ He touched the handcuffs in his pocket.
‘Just you try and cage me.’
It was evident to Pat that Cathal had thought just as hard on this subject as he had. ‘I can easily cage you. I’ll lock the door.’
‘I’ll kick the door to bits or get out of the window.’
‘I’ll tie you up. I’ve got some handcuffs too.’
‘I’ll scream the place down and drum on the wall with my feet. There are people in these rooms on either side. The whole street would come and rescue me.’
‘I’d have to gag you.’
‘I’d swallow my gag and choke or else get a scream out somehow.’
Pat knew that he could not gag Cathal. It is very difficult to gag a desperate person with safety. Pat’s head swayed again. He was beginning to feel almost tearful with self-pity. He must sleep tonight and soon. He must make himself ready for tomorrow. Oh God, tomorrow. There must be some way out of this agony. Logic.
‘Pat,’ said Cathal. His face was indistinct among the cobwebs and the clatter of the rain. ‘Understand that it is no use trying to tie me up. I’d be like a wild animal in a trap that would bite its own leg off to get away. I’d get out or kill myself doing it. Imagine yourself—’
‘I’ll leave someone with you.’
‘There’s no one you can spare. Everyone who knows will be out tomorrow and you can’t trust anyone else. Besides, I’d get away whoever you left with me. It’s too late now to keep me out of it. Let me come with you, Pat, I want to be with you, see that you’ve got to let me be with you.’
Cathal’s voice now was strained and childish and Pat realized that Cathal too was in the last stages of exhaustion. Something had got to be decided and he must not go to sleep. If he went to sleep now he would wake to find Cathal gone.
Pat moved, trying to keep himself conscious, and his arm brushed the holster of his revolver. He opened his eyes wide. It was perfectly simple after all. He had only to shoot his brother in the leg.
Pat saw the room very clearly, as if it had only now been lighted up, the cobwebs slightly swaying in the air from the lamp, the blotched sloping walls where the rain tapped, Christ displaying His Sacred Heart. Cathal was crouched on the bed underneath his shadow, moving himself about slightly, stiff and chilled upon the damp mattress. Pat saw his face sharply defined, pinched together about his long nose with tiredness and anxiety. There was a pathetic exhausted defiance about the pouting mouth. Cathal’s dark hair kept falling forward as if it were wearily trying to draw his head down.
Does he know what I am thinking, thought Pat as he stared. He fingered the revolver. Then somehow out of the dream he was almost in, out of the Sacred Heart, came the thought that he would kill Cathal. That would be simpler still. That would make him entirely safe. If Cathal were dead he would be beyond harm and tomorrow Pat would be free to die himself. Was that not after all the best thing? He loved Cathal too much to allow him to be hurt by anyone else. Only Pat should hurt him, and that would be no hurt but simply to lay him to sleep. He loved Cathal too much.
Pat grunted and tried to get up and lurched to his knees. He had been thinking something that was insane or else he had been in a dream. He groaned and said, ‘Cathal, I’ve got to sleep, I’ve got to rest. Have some mercy on me.’
‘Promise that you’ll let me go tomorrow.’
‘I can’t, I can’t.’
‘Promise, and then we can both sleep.’
‘I shall be lying here on my face in a minute,’ said Pat. He was not sure whether he had said the words aloud. Cathal would soon get the key out of his pocket. The room was indistinct again as if it were full of fumes.
‘Promise.’
‘I promise,’ said Pat. ‘All right, I promise.’
It was a lie. But what else could he do? He groaned, leaning against the door, trying to get up. He had to sleep. He would solve the problem tomorrow.
‘You do really promise, you do?’
‘Yes, yes. Where’s the key? Here. Come down from here. You must go to your own room. We’ve both got to sleep now. Come.’
The stairway opened and the lamp still burning at the top of it. It was dark below like a pit. Pat held on to the banisters. ‘Can you carry that lamp, Cathal.’
He pushed open the door of Cathal’s room and the light showed it. The lamp jolted down on to the table. Cathal, his head drooping, took off his shoes and his trousers and got into bed. He started to say something but it turned into a drowsy mumble and in a moment he was fast asleep.
Pat looked about the familiar little room: the bookcase with Cathal’s books staggering upon the shelves, the pictures of birds pinned to the wall, Cathal’s model yacht. It seemed his own childhood that was present here. He had had indeed, with Cathal, a second boyhood, a second innocence. For the first time he grasped what was going to happen tomorrow as a nightmare, as something terrible. He had so often seen his brother lie down to sleep like that on holidays, when they were as tired as they were tonight; and they slept and in the early morning went swimming in the cold sea. Would it never be like that again? Tomorrow he would be killing men. Could the nightmare not pass away and leave them innocent and free in the morning? He leaned over his brother, thrusting back the dark lock of hair from his face, and touching that place upon his temple where the muzzle of a revolver might be pressed. Had Cathal got to die? Had he got to die? They were so young. He suddenly recalled and understood his mother’s words: there is no such thing as dying for Ireland.
Chapter Twenty-three
SOON after nine o’clock on Easter Monday morning Second Lieutenant Andrew Chase-White was walking briskly up Blessington Street. He had decided that he must have some sort of explanation with his cousin Pat.
Andrew had decided to go to Rathblane not really because his interest in Millie had increased: that interest steadily diminished, reaching zero when he was actually in bed with her. His best, he thought afterwards his purest, moment with Millie had been when he first kissed her. This event, like a rocket suddenly bursting and slowly descending, had cast a shower of fading light over his subsequent movements. He felt drugged, romantic: but it was despair that made him act. The loss of Frances, as the news of it came to the different, the outlying, regions of his consciousness made his whole being into something restless and diseased. He could not see how, moment to moment, to exist any more. He put off informing his mother of the catastrophe and suffered her questions with churlish writhing. He resolved to return at once to England but recalled that he had to report to Longford at the end of the week. This obligation, which might have seemed a consoling necessity of fate, tormented him too, and he thought: I shall be sent out there, I shall be killed, and nothing will have had any meaning. I shall have done nothing, I shall not even have understood. Frances was the whole meaning of my life, and now my life has no meaning and is empty.
The sense was one of emptiness and of strewn pieces and of the sudden disappearance of any picture of himself. A week ago he had occupied himself, packed himself tight with satisfied being, and glimpsed all about him the reflection of a handsome young British officer, the darling of the world, a fine young man with a bride. Now he could scarcely believe that his physical appearance was not utterly altered. He could indeed feel the expression of his face puckering and sagging as if his head were shrinking. He was empty and ragged wi
thin: and he felt at moments that his whole body must collapse in obedience to a vacuum.
He went to Millie simply in order to have some action, something, to fill up the void. He felt that Millie might make him into a person again. His altered being must acquire a history. He must have something to remember that was un-Frances. What sort of new person Millie might make of him, and whether she might not like Circe change him into a brute it did not occur to him to wonder. He was in the state of misery which dispenses with all question of right and wrong. He wanted an experience, a transformation. The little glow, not yet faded, from the moment of the kiss, cast a rosy light upon Millie’s image, like a cult statue seen by the light of a fire. She was all that was electrical, and magical, and naked. And Andrew did not want to die without having been to bed with a beautiful woman.
Even so, he would have funked it if Millie had not, directly on his arrival, made him very drunk with whiskey. He hardly remembered how he had got into her bedroom. But he remembered the rest. Millie reclining unclothed in the lamplight, her hair undone, her legs relaxed and slightly parted, her hands folded on her shiny plump stomach, Millie propped up by pillows, revealed, offered, seemed to him an utter stranger and filled him with fright. He did not know where to look at her. Her face, at once dazed, complacent and vulnerable, seemed to him unrecognizable and obscene. He undressed miserably, hiding himself, and felt as he took off his trousers that he was become spindly and shrimp-like, a little white thing that might at any moment fall through a crack in the floor.
Of course, it had been no good. He had been almost in tears. He shivered all over as if he were cold, and did indeed feel very cold. Pimply gooseflesh rose leprously along his thighs. He did not know how to touch Millie. His hands would not obey him, but like recalcitrant animals curled up or sought refuge beneath his arms or behind his back. He sagged and lumbered in the bed like a paralytic; and Millie’s brisk attempts to arouse his interest filled him with a disgust of himself which approached nausea. At the same time he felt intensely sorry for Millie and ashamed for her, wanting to veil, to conceal her too eager face, working away so close to his. The rest of her body he dared not look at, and to conceal his shrinking he became like stone. He longed to leave her, longed for the decency of clothes, but still he slumped there in the bed, sinking into an insensibility which was almost like sleep.
The arrival of Pat awoke him to a pain of quite a different order. He was like someone lying half conscious in the mud who suddenly receives a bayonet in the ribs. With clumsy haste he got himself dressed, listening to the voices of Pat and Millie in the next room. He had no doubt that Pat had recognized him: and when he pictured what it was that Pat had seen from the doorway he wondered whether he had not better just shoot himself and be done with it. When Millie called him out he could hardly force himself through the door and leaned there helplessly, trying to control a pitiful shuddering in his face. He did not then reflect why Pat had come. He only knew that he had been seen thus, and seen by the person who, it was suddenly clear to him, mattered most in the world.
On Sunday Andrew took his bicycle and set off early for the country. He wanted to avoid his mother who was asking whether he and Frances would not come with her to the Easter service at the Mariners’ Church. He intended to cycle to Howth, which had nothing to recommend it except that it was the opposite way from Rathblane. In fact, he got as far as Clontarf and took refuge from the rain in a bar where he sat for several hours. It did then occur to him to wonder why Pat had arrived so late at Millie’s house and had come straight up to her bedroom. He had been far too agitated to overhear any of their conversation. But he could not really attend to this problem, nor indeed did he care about it. Millie herself had been blotted out of his mind. All that remained was his shame and Pat as the witness of it. With this there returned to him, flooding and burning his heart, all his childhood love for his cousin. Sitting in the dingy bar in Clontarf he buried his face in his hands.
Andrew thought, at first hopelessly and as of something impossible, of going to see Pat and demanding from him some kind of help, some healing touch. Only Pat could heal this wound of which Andrew now felt himself likely to die. If he could only remove that picture of himself from Pat’s consciousness forever: or if that was impossible at least in some way modify or overlay it. But how could he do this? There was no possible explanation of what Pat had seen which would make it less disgusting and less base than it was. Yet if he could only talk to Pat about it, perhaps tell him about Frances, or accuse himself in Pat’s presence, this might a little lessen the pain. The idea was impossible: Pat would be cold and scornful or would refuse to talk at all. He would simply not participate in Andrew’s scene. The idea was absurd; and yet it was also impossible to report at Longford, to return to France, with this horror unresolved and some alleviation, however small, unattempted. By Sunday night Andrew was beginning to be certain that he would make the attempt. On Monday morning, after a sleepless night, he knew that he could not endure any more hours without seeing Pat.
A light rain was drifting down as Andrew approached the Dumay’s house and flashes of bright sunlight were making the wet pavements dazzling. The door of the house was unlocked as usual. Andrew did not knock but pushed the door cautiously open. He did not want to meet Cathal or Aunt Kathleen and hoped that he might be able to slink straight upstairs to Pat’s room. Sick with anticipation, he stood for a moment in the hall to listen. He heard voices in the kitchen.
Andrew moved quietly toward the kitchen door, deciding that if Pat were in there he would just go on up to Pat’s room and wait. He did not want to meet him in company. He listened.
‘And you won’t worry any more about letting me fight? I’ll be all right surely.’
‘Yes, yes,’
‘And you’ll let me have a gun? Sure I can use a rifle.’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Will we be firing on them directly when it all starts at twelve?’
‘I’ll do what I’m told and so will you.’
‘Why can’t we go straight to Dublin Castle and throw them out of there?’
‘We haven’t enough men.’
‘What I like to think of is the surprise there’ll be this day! And they all saying we’d never fight!’
‘Do shut up, will you, Cathal.’
‘And when the shooting starts it’ll be a revolution, just like James Connolly said. Sure Ireland will go mad.’
‘Did you lock the front door like I told you?’
‘Yes, I did. Well, I’ll just see. God, we’ll fry the English! They’ll—’ Cathal opened the door and came face to face with Andrew.
Andrew had been listening with curiosity. He was struck by Cathal’s excited tone, but he had not taken in the meaning of what was said. He now saw over Cathal’s shoulder Pat Dumay in full Volunteer uniform and armed. At the same instant he grasped himself as a British officer in uniform and armed. But still he did not understand.
Cathal jumped back with an exclamation and then turned to Pat. ‘He was listening at the door!’
Pat said, or rather drawled, ‘Come inside, Andrew, come inside.’
Andrew obeyed him automatically. His own private emotions and expectations in coming to the house were still clouding about his head, and this entirely new crisis left him bewildered.
Pat said, ‘Did you hear what we were speaking of just now?’
‘Yes, but—’
‘I’m afraid you must consider yourself my prisoner. Put your hands up, please.’
Andrew realized that Pat was pointing a revolver at him. He tried to think how he should react, but all he felt was blinding surprise and shock. He did not raise his hands, but moved them a little from his sides in a gesture of helpless enquiry.
‘Disarm him, Cathal.’
Cathal quickly took Andrew’s revolver from the holster and pushed it across the kitchen table. When he saw his revolver lying on the table Andrew began to understand the conversation he had overheard.
‘Can I have that gun?’ said Cathal, wide-eyed.
‘Shut up. Go and lock that door as you ought to have done before. Move over here, will you, and sit down on that chair.’
Andrew moved and sat down. Cathal returned to the room and stood against the door. Andrew knew that he ought to take some initiative now, to try to get out quickly, while his cousins were both as surprised at his arrival as he had been surprised at his reception. He could see doubt, even bewilderment, in Pat’s eyes. He ought to act now before Pat had formed any policy or reached any decision. He glanced about, noting the scullery door, the door into the side passage. He began to get up.
‘Sit down, I said.’
Andrew sat down. The habit of obedience to Pat, formed in remotest childhood, was too strong in him. He knew then that it was no good and the moment of possibility had passed. He was indeed a prisoner. He stared at Pat with gradual appalled comprehension.
