“Who is it?” I shouted. “Come in.”
Nothing happened. I jumped out of bed, and opened the door. Mrs. Travers made an agonised gesture of silence at me.
“Hullo, Mother,” I cried cheerfully. “Good morning. What do you want?”
The wretched woman gave a moan of fear, and rolled her eyes towards the bathroom.
“Muriel’s key,” she whispered.
“Muriel’s key?” I shouted. “Here it is. I had to lock her in last night, for her own safety.”
Mrs. Travers uttered a queer despairing click in her throat, and ran from me. I dressed, with my door ajar. As soon as I heard the bathroom door open, I stepped out. The tall form of Mr. Travers, in a long grey dressing gown, went down the passage. I followed him, hesitated, coughed, and pushed open the door of his dressing room. He was arranging his shaving tackle and toothbrush with geometrical care on his washstand. He turned, and stared at me without expression.
I felt my jaw stiffen.
“Mr. Travers,” I said. “Next time you strike my wife, first of all, I will knock your teeth down your throat. Then I will go and inform, first the police, and then Father O’Sullivan. Do you understand?”
His face did not even flicker. His eyes were veiled and dead. He stood, regarding me with expressionless attention. There was something terrifying in his lack of expression. I turned quickly, and went out of the room, using all my force of will not to hurry. When I got back to my own room, my knees were trembling.
He appeared quite normal when he came down to breakfast. It was a silent meal. Before he left for his office, he kissed Mrs. Travers and Muriel as if nothing had happened. The incident was closed. None of us ever mentioned it again. Indeed, after twenty-four hours it was difficult to believe it had ever happened. Lance came back—his firm had sent him away for a while to study some special branch of his work—and we had several quite riotous evenings of games, like those when I first came to the house. Mr. Travers was in great form, and seemed to go out of his way to be jovial to me: but more than once I caught him looking at me with cold hostility.
So the five weeks dragged on, and it seemed we would never be on our own at all. I tried, if only to distract myself, to plunge into my work at the office: but the effort was unrewarded, and the only thing I did on my own initiative brought me an instant rebuke, so I gave it up. Then I met my literary friend again, and let him take me off to another play. It meant sending an untrue message to Muriel, but I had no scruples. After all, I told myself, the lie was for her parents, not for her.
The play hit me like a flash of lightning. All my desire to write leaped up in me with tenfold strength. I seemed to see and to understand. All that I had tried to do before filled me with impatience and contempt. Now, with the strength of new experience, I burned to express myself, to find the outlet for everything that had been vexing and bewildering and delighting me. When I got home of an evening, my one thought was to sit down and write. Muriel and her mother smiled on it for a night or two. Then Muriel began to pout, and Mrs. Travers took me aside and rallied me on the unwisdom of neglecting her. I replied grimly that I was trying to earn a little more money. She looked gently sceptical, but withdrew.
At the end of a week, I had written a play in verse. I made a fair copy, and sent it to the manager of the players. Nothing happened, and, to fill in the time while I was waiting, I wrote a short story. I wrote it in a single evening, stayed up late to copy it out, and sent it to the editor of a magazine that my friend had shown me. For ten days or more I waited, with not a word from either. Then, one evening, as I came in from the office, I noticed Muriel looking at me with an air of excitement. I asked her what was up, and, like a child playing peep-bo, she brought a package out from behind her back. It was my play.
“Oh, Luke, do open it! I’ve been dying to see. What do they say?”
They said precious little. A brief note regretted that the play was unsuitable: that was all.
Immediately Muriel’s arms were round my neck, and she smothered me with sympathy and caresses. If there is a thing I loathe in this world, it is that blind uncritical partisanship for the individual, commonly miscalled loyalty. Muriel had not the faintest notion of the merits of the case. She only knew that something to do with her property had been found wanting, and, like the mother who thinks her child a paragon, she was incensed. I had all I could do not to tear her arms away from my neck: and the loving smiles which she and her mother kept giving each other all the evening, smiles in which was that hellish light of maternal indulgence—I can see I’d better leave the subject alone. Even at this distance, I can’t write dispassionately about it.
The result of it was, that when, a day or so later, I had a note to say that my story had been accepted, I did not tell anyone except my literary friend. His name was Cummins. I lost sight of him soon after this, and I don’t know what happened him. This time, I thought, I’ll confront them with a fait accompli. So I put up in silence with the occasional solicitudes of Muriel and her mother, and Mr. Travers’ jocose references to my literary ambitions, and waited for my story to appear.
By the time it did appear, we’d been in our own house for about three weeks. I knew which day the magazine would be out, but I did not dare buy a copy on the way to the office. I waited till my dinner hour, and then, with my heart thumping and my mouth dry, I faltered into Eason’s and bought a copy. Once safely out, I stopped in a doorway and opened it. Yes— there was my story: “The Mountain,” by Luke Mangan. How strange it looked in print; how fine in some places, how bare in others! Aah, there was a misprint! How annoying. Never mind. People would see what it ought to be. I went slowly away, reading, hardly noticing where I went, avoiding the people on the pavement by instinct.
The story was about a princess with a high-sounding name who fell in love with a mountain, and wondered where he went on the rainy days when she could not see him. Her trouble grew so great that the kisses of her Beloved (a Prince, needless to say) could not distract her. She called a Wise Woman, who prescribed a concentrated diet of the said kisses. “That’s no good,” said the Princess, only I made her say it a damn sight more poetically. “He kisses me, and wraps his arms around me, and holds me close against him: and still I think of the mountain.” “To hell with you, so,” says the Wise Woman, again in much more poetical language. “You’ll get no good of any man.” So the Princess, after wandering about a bit and wondering what to do, has a row with the Prince, and he rushes off in such a rage that he spurs his horse, and is thrown and killed. The Princess makes a dignified and poetic to-do over his body, and goes off to the Mountain, and all her women keen like blazes, and that’s the end. All very harmless and silly and in the period, served up with the appropriate lingo. “It was a long road, brothers of my heart, a long road surely …” and all that sort of thing. Scores of nice boys and girls in Dublin were turning it out by the yard. It wasn’t too bad, my story, it had a touch of something in it, freshness, sincerity, and what not. I was damned proud of it, and I wouldn’t be wholly ashamed of it now, as an essay in a vein that’s been long outmoded.
Well—when I got home that evening, I handed the magazine to Muriel, without a word, and sat down to my supper. She was silent, incredulous, staring at the page.
“Luke!”
It was a whisper of such wonder, and such happiness, that I was startled. Her eyes were shining with tears.
“Oh, Luke. My clever, clever boy.”
She flung her arms round me again. Her delight was so genuine and so heartfelt that I was really touched.
“You’d better read it,” I said laughingly, “before you say all those nice things to me.”
“I will, of course I will.”
She began, but after a few words she jumped up to get me the butter, and see if my toast was right. Then she got a fright that my egg would boil too hard. Finally, I took her by the shoulders, pushed her down into a chair, and turned her with her back to me, till she should read the story. Eve
n so, she kept screwing round and giving me loving smiles. Then, by degrees, she grew quieter, and sat quite still.
“Well?” I said at last, as unconcernedly as I could.
“It’s beautiful, but it’s so sad. Why did she have to go off? Couldn’t she love him?”
I tried to explain, and at once the thing began to sound foolish. Muriel nodded, her eyes fixed on me.
“I must read it again,” she said. “Then perhaps I’ll see.”
She sat down, and for a long time she pored over the magazine. I was flattered, but uneasy. I found I did not want to be cross-examined on the story. I got up, and went over to get the evening paper, and saw that she was weeping. At once my heart melted with tenderness for her. Did the beauty of the story move her as much as that? I sat on the arm of her chair, and put an arm around her.
To my utter amazement, she threw it off.
“I see what it is,” she burst out. “You’re tired of me, you don’t love me, you never did love me.”
“Muriel! What on earth——”
“Oh yes. You’ve put it very artfully, all the other way round, but I can see what you mean, perfectly well. You’re tired of me, and you want to go away and leave me. And you wish I was dead.”
I tried to keep my patience.
“Do tell me where you get all that nonsense from?”
But she would not listen to reason and argument. She kept her face in the chair cushions, and went on sobbing and accusing me. In the end I lost patience and pulled her up forcibly and sat her on my knee. I shook her, till half her hair came down.
“Now listen to me,” I said. “I’ve had enough of this. That story has got nothing whatever to do with you. It never had. It never will. I’m not tired of you, and I don’t want to go away. See?”
It was the first time I had laid a rough hand on her. For an instant I thought she was going to roar like a small child. Then a look of extraordinary sly satisfaction rose in her face. She made a purring sound, and snuggled against me. All the rest of the evening she was happy, and we talked for a long time and made plans. It was far better than it had ever been since before we were married.
My story had other sequels—two: for both of which I was wholly unprepared. The first was a letter from Mr. Travers. It opened without any form of address or preamble.
“This morning a business colleague drew my attention to a publication in which appeared a piece bearing your signature. He said that, as you were my son-in-law, he thought I ought to see it. I read it, and I can say that never in my experience have I had the pain of reading anything more completely loathsome and disgusting. How any printer can be found to print such filth passes my understanding …”
and much more to the same effect.
I was at first astonished, then very angry. I wrote back in similar form and asked him to what part of the story he took exception? To what did he apply these damning allegations? Since I had to confess that I must be very depraved indeed, for I could not see what was wrong. Nor, I added, could Muriel.
An answer came without delay.
“I had hoped that at least you would have spared my innocent daughter the contagion of your lewd imaginings. You ask to what part of your ‘story’ I take exception. On reflection, I am not surprised that you find it necessary to ask such a question. A man who can so lower himself as to suggest in cold print the sexual congress of two human beings is obviously so lost to all sense of decency as not to realise how his infamy stinks in the nostrils of all decent men and women. I knew I had allowed my daughter to ally herself with a plebeian. I did not know I had delivered her to a libertine.”
“The man’s mad,” I said to Muriel. “Raving mad.”
But Muriel looked uneasy, and, when I came home that evening, sure enough, she was in tears, asking me how I could do such a thing, and bring such disgrace on us all. I was too sick and sore to answer. I let her go on till she tired herself out.
“How you do change your tune,” I said at last. “Have you no mind of your own? You were proud enough of me, till your father started this nonsense.”
She shook her head. She’d never liked the story, she said. She knew all along there was something wrong with it.
“Well,” I said, “you can all go to blazes. I’m not going to stop writing, no matter what you say.”
But she had allies—more than she knew. Next morning I was sent for to the boss. He had the magazine open on his desk. Good God, I thought, what now.
“See here, young Mangan.” He banged the back of his hand on the open page. “You’re paid here to do the work of the Department, not to waste your time on this sort of rubbish.”
I flushed angrily.
“That is not done in the Department’s time, sir. I do my writing in my spare time.”
“You do, do you. Well—let me tell you this. If you do any more of it, your time will be all spare time, as far as the Department is concerned. D’ye understand?”
The brutal injustice of it stung me to retort.
“If I spent my free time in the pubs, like the others, you would not complain, sir. Just because I choose to do something different, something you don’t understand, you interfere with me.
There was a silence. He breathed hard.
“Your record here has been reasonably good so far. This is the first complaint I’ve had of you. If it wasn’t, you’d walk out this minute, for speaking to me in that impertinent manner. Apologise!” He roared at me suddenly, his face crimson, his eyes popping. “Apologise, do you hear me! Or out you go.”
“I’m sorry, sir,” I said, after a pause.
“I should damn well think so. Now get out. And—mind you—no more of this nonsense, or all the apologies in the world won’t save you.”
Soon after that Father O’Sullivan came round to see me—the one I threatened to tell on my father-in-law—and gave me a long lecture, not on the supposed immorality of my story, which seemed to have escaped him, but on the danger of having anything to do with the gang of writers and so-called literary men who were doing their best to ruin Dublin, and pervert all the young people to their hideous doctrines. According to him, they were atheists to a man, their plays were blasphemous, and one of them, by name Yeats, practised the black arts.
That was what I had against me; family, church, bread-and-butter. You know the answer. I gave in. Perhaps, if I had had any real belief in my own powers, I might have told them all to go to hell. But I doubt it. They were too many for me. Looking back now at that ignorant, perplexed, beleaguered poor young divil, I don’t see what else he could have done. He had a central core of judgment; there was a world in which he was at home and moved with authority; but neither could help him.
And who was he, and who am I, that I should get maudlin over him? Even if he had the seed of writing in him, what did he do more than tens of thousands of girls who give up their own hopes to look after a mother or a father? Wrong, yes, damnably, infernally wrong, I grant you, but not a thing to be sentimentalised over. And many of them, poor things, make a real gesture of self-sacrifice. He didn’t. He caved in.
Chapter IX
I don’t know if you are given to reading biographies or autobiographies, as I am—I read little else. If you are, you will have found that nine out of ten of them begin interestingly enough, go on to a climax reached, say, in the twenties, and after that fall away. I don’t think that’s only because people remember their early days better, and are more receptive then, and have more possibilities. I think the deeper reason is that many lives lead more or less directly towards a crucial point, and, once this point is reached, they run for the rest of their span on lines determined at that point. After that point, I won’t say they go down hill, but their course is predictable and more or less even. The bus has become a tram. A decision, taken at that important point, has fixed the whole subsequent direction and course of the life.
Or, to use a metaphor of jams and jellies, the average human being sets early. And, once he’s set,
there’s nothing in his story but a succession of experiences of similar colour. He may not set as an individual, in his own heart and mind: but he is set outwardly. His economic position and his responsibilities determine pretty accurately the course he will run. So the artist who has made a success in one line repeats it, to his increasing prosperity, until he can’t repeat it any more: the young diplomat who attracts an ambassador’s attention and is pulled out of the ruck is put into a certain channel and runs along it till his flow becomes a trickle or he is retired with a title: and so on. And, with every one of them, the interesting time, the time worth reading about, is the time that leads up to the decisive incident.
After my capitulation, I seemed to be done for. The reader might well assume that all was over. But the story wasn’t done yet. Those were not the rails appointed for the tram.
For a long time, the tram thought they were. I took no trouble, I made no sort of effort, I hoped, I suppose, by sheer passivity to become dulled to acquiescence in the Rathmines way of life. Certainly I did not resist as the Travers tightened their hold. There was no major issue, no tug of war. Mr. Travers left me alone. Everything was done through the women. Gently, softly, with scores of invisible threads, they bound me down as Gulliver was bound down by the people of Lilliput: and, God knows, I was no giant. Within eighteen months of my marriage, I was fat, my cheeks were a fine red, and I was drained of vitality. The real I lay hid deep inside, and was fast going to sleep. I wasn’t actively unhappy. I wasn’t actively anything. I was caught, and I’d given up struggling.
It was autumn, October or early November. The day had been wet, but just before sunset the rain lifted, and a wet saffron light peeped through the clouds and flooded the city. The roofs gleamed, the vanes winked, the chimneys stood in a breathless splendour, the mud and slime of the streets were transfigured with swimming gold. For maybe five minutes the city had a glory that touched everything, even the broken hoardings, the advertisements on the Liffey bridges, and the line of battered old growlers by the quays, and turned the jarveys’ shelter into a pagoda. A Guinness’s barge breasting the river was the Argo, and bore the golden fleece as a trophy before her, where the light caught the wave thrown up by her blunt bow. The people wore an exultant, unearthly look, and the little bare-footed newsboys that ran about yelling Mail and Herald were elves of the shining gutters. My heart was lifted up by the beauty of it all, and I walked along smiling, looking at my fellow creatures with an abstract love.
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