by Iris Murdoch
‘That is what you will be with marriage, my dear. Without marriage you would be nothing.’
Millie sat down on the stool, smoothing the purple silk over her thighs and gathering it tightly with one hand behind her knees. ‘Yes, you are clever. I could say that I might find someone else more accommodating. But unfortunately you know quite well that I could only tolerate an arrangement of this sort with a very old friend and a highly intelligent one at that.’
They were silent for a moment.
Christopher said with emotion, ‘Millie, I want you to be Mrs Bellman. I want Mrs Bellman to be you.’
‘It doesn’t sound so good,’ she said with a sigh. ‘Well, you are my last temptation, the devil come to buy my soul.’
‘Hardly your last temptation, darling Millie. But sell, please sell!’
‘I’ll think about it!’ said Millie, jumping up. ‘Or perhaps I shall shoot myself instead. Do you think I have the temperament for suicide?’
‘No. You love yourself far too dearly. We are not suicidal types, my darling.’
‘I’m afraid you’re right. And now I’m going to turn you out because I’ve got another visitor coming.’
‘Who?’ said Christopher. He got up, trembling with irritation and jealousy.
‘Barney. He’s coming for his evening bowl of milk. And he’s to help me sort some papers. He’s so devoted and useful.’
Christopher could not understand how Millie could encourage the futile crawling homage of someone like Barnabas Drumm. For many years now Barney had had, unknown, Christopher suspected, to Kathleen, a sort of position as a lackey, or serviceable buffoon in Millie’s household. How this curious relationship had started, or why it continued, Christopher did not know. He supposed that Millie was simply incapable of refusing a devotion however absurd. He was hurt by this lack of dignity in her, and he was a little affronted too on behalf of Kathleen whom he respected. This little game of Millie’s, he felt, would have to stop. It had of course never occurred to him to be jealous of Barney.
Millie had gone to the door. ‘Barney’ll take a knock,’ she said thoughtfully.
‘How do you mean?’
‘If I say yes.’
‘If you say yes. Dearest Millie—’
‘All right, all right. Come to me on Wednesday. Come before luncheon, about midday. Or no, I’ll come to you. Isn’t that the day when Hilda and Frances go to town? I’d like to come to Sandycove. It would feel so dangerous! I’ll give you your answer then. Now please go, I’m so tired.’
They moved out on to the dark landing. There was a stirring down below and Millie looked over. ‘Why, I think that’s Barney coming up. Come, boy, come, boy!’ She whistled shrilly as if for a dog. ‘Good boy, good boy, come, come!’
Chapter Six
WHEN Cathal had asked his question, ‘When is it to be?’ Pat Dumay had not known the answer. He knew the answer now. The armed rising was to begin on Easter Sunday at six o’clock in the evening.
Pat had known for some long time that it would happen, that it would come. He had long felt it as inevitable, had taken it as it were into his own body. It was as if he were fixed to a steel chain the other end of which was hidden in that imagined mystery of violence, and he could feel it almost as a physical pain, a physical pleasure, drawing him towards it. But it was one thing to know, however certainly, that it would come; it was quite another to be given a date and a definite diminishing final interim of five days. What had been imagined had entered time and now the pattern of the hours lay under its authority. The news, which Pat had received this very morning, Tuesday the eighteenth of April, had been itself like a moment of violence, a blow which spread out through his flesh like a red rosette of anguish and delight. He was afraid. But such fear was a glorious decoration. He was afraid, but he knew himself too to be a brave man. He had not enjoyed the spectacle of others suffering in a war which he could not join, and he had not liked it either when they distinguished themselves. There had been moments when his own war had seemed an unreal sham. But there had been for him no alternative to that war.
It seemed to Pat that he had been born to a vision of fighting for Ireland. His parents had had little Irish patriotism and this lack was for him a part of their utter commonplaceness. His own recognition of himself as far from commonplace came with his early sense of his Irish destiny, his sense of belonging not to himself but to some design of history. He knew himself, even as a boy, as one chosen and already under orders. His first vivid memories were of the South African war, Dublin decked out in Transvaal flags, Boer songs sung in the streets, and the crowd at the Irish Times office to cheer a victory over the English. He had seen the Union Jack burnt and plumed troopers charging a crowd. The shock, the experience of subjection, the knowledge of belonging to a subject race, came into him with his first consciousness, together with a cold fierce will to freedom. And when, at George the Fifth’s coronation visit, the town had been decked with hostile streamers declaring ‘Thou art not conquered, yet, dear land’, Pat had felt himself come of age for Ireland. The enormity of the insult laid upon his people, matched with his own unshaken sense of his worth, produced in him such a charge of power and resentment that at times he felt himself almost capable of acting and succeeding alone.
His patriotism was not of the diffuse and talkative kind, and though it was certainly romantic it was with some distilled essence of romanticism, something bitter and dark and pure. He had small use for ‘Cathleen ni Houlihan’, nor was he interested in Patrick Pearse’s archaistic visions of a virtuous manly society whose manners were somehow to be restored. He had never joined the Gaelic League, and though he had attempted to learn Irish he did not think the language important. He was himself a matter-of-fact practising Catholic, but the pattern of his religion, though it remained secure, did not enter into the chief passion of his life. He was not one of those who made their Catholicism into nationalism. He was unmoved by the Holy Ireland affected by his stepfather, nor was he, like his younger brother, an ardent theorist. His Ireland was nameless, a pure Ireland of the mind, to be relentlessly served by a naked sense of justice and a naked self-assertion. There were in his drama only these two characters, Ireland and himself.
When the Irish Volunteers were founded in nineteen thirteen Pat joined them at once. He was in fact at the time on the point of attaching himself to James Connolly’s Irish Citizen Army. He had been much affected by the Labour troubles and much impressed by the great strike earlier that year. The courage and discipline of the unions stirred him deeply. Here again he had seen uniformed men attacking a crowd and had digested a violence of anger which nearly choked him. He had taken young Cathal to hear Jim Larkin speak, and had received certain new complexities into his concept of justice. So there were two kinds of masters to be reckoned with; and he listened, and his young brother listened even more avidly, to the words of those who said that the fight for freedom was a single fight and that the capitalist tyrant and the English tyrant must be driven out in the self-same battle.
However, when it came to it he joined the Volunteers. Without calling himself a Socialist, for he would never have called himself anything, he had no doubt at all that the capitalist system was irrational, tyrannical and wicked. The sense of being a subject, a serf, which his sensitive awareness of his nationality had brought home to his pride at such an early age made him ready to identify himself with the Dublin workers. But whereas he envisaged the liberation of Ireland as something singularly simple and pure, he could not picture the liberation of the working class without becoming entangled in ambiguous speculations and theories. He was not convinced that the two fights could be fought at once and he was sure that the affair of Ireland came first.
He joined the Volunteers also out of a sense that here was his place. He despised the genteel snobbery of many of the Volunteer supporters and their ‘employer’s Ireland’; but he felt that the hour of bloodshed would sufficiently separate the sheep from the goats. The men who were pre
pared to shoot and kill would be men of the right kind, and when the day came they and the Citizen Army would form one brotherhood. Meanwhile there was of course much less nonsense about the Citizen Army, whose discipline and fanaticism Pat observed with respect; and when he learnt that Connolly had lately interviewed each Citizen Army man individually and asked him if he would be willing to fight if the Army had to act without the Volunteers, and that each man had said yes, Pat felt something very like envy. But for just this reason, that the Volunteers represented something less compact and clearheaded, Pat had decided that his task lay with them. He conceived that the Volunteers needed backbone: he proposed himself as a stiffening agent; and he was influenced too by the idea that, in the Volunteer organization where there were fewer enthusiasts, he would receive a more rapid promotion.
Soon after joining the Volunteers, however, he discovered two things, first that the desired backbone was already present in the guise of an extensive secret group of the Irish Republican Brotherhood, and secondly, that he was not destined to shoot rapidly to the top of the military hierarchy. He was, he was never quite sure why, a little looked askance at. He overheard himself referred to as ‘Hotspur’ and ‘that mad boy’. He felt the unfairness of this, as he knew that in matters of action he was cold, all cold with a chilly clarity which even surprised him. But he hid his disappointment as he hid everything else. After the beginning of the war, when the Volunteers had divided in two and the traitors had shuffled away into the British Army, Pat rose to the rank of captain. He still felt himself misjudged by those above and he did not seek their friendship. Equally he did not encourage the personal loyalty of his men, though when it sometimes seemed to him that they idolized him he was not displeased. He lived privately, going to his work each day at the solicitor’s office, but conceiving of himself entirely as a soldier.
There was another reason why Pat had not joined the Citizen Army. He could not have served under James Connolly. He admired and respected Connolly, and there had been a time when, holding Cathal by the hand, he had followed often in the procession while the great man marched dourly, followed by a supporter with an orange box, to some chosen street corner. Connolly would mount his box and the two boys would listen spellbound, though Pat was always the first one to want to go. But Connolly was both too human and too theoretical to command the devotion which Pat wanted to offer; and given the structure and temper of the Citizen Army it would have been impossible to be in it without feeling an intense emotional loyalty to its leader. Pat was a man of savage independence and yet it often seemed to him that he would have brooked a limitless discipline from a perfect master. He felt himself as a person surrounded on the whole by second-rate men and dangerous to his surroundings. He would gladly have given up his dangerous will to one who should have been worthy to use him as an instrument. For someone truly great and ruthless he would have embraced both slavery and suffering. But there was no such person. It had once seemed to him that he might so have served Roger Casement. But he had only met Casement twice and Casement was now in Berlin. There were men in Dublin, such as Thomas MacDonagh and Joseph Plunkett, whom he could respect. But the only one who really moved him was Patrick Pearse.
Pearse troubled Pat, attracted, annoyed and disturbed him. He had first met Pearse in connection with the Wolfe Tone Memorial Committee, and he had heard him speak at the funeral of O’Donovan Rossa. He recognized there the power of a pure spirit, the sheer selfless strength which was in the end the only thing that Pat bowed to. Hundreds of things about Pearse irritated him. The man was given to all kinds of infantile nonsense. He romanticized Ireland’s heroic past, which he peopled not only with Red Branch Knights, but also with ghosts and fairies and leprechauns in which he himself seemed half to believe. He was a blatant admirer of Napoleon, an alleged lock of whose hair he fatuously displayed to his friends. He also romanticized war in a way which Pat found alien and undignified, babbling about ‘the red wine of the battlefields warming the heart of the earth’ and other rubbish of this sort. But nevertheless he was something like a great man and Pat was emotionally troubled by him in a way he could not entirely understand and would often have been glad to be rid of.
Admirable too was Pearse’s chastity, his abstemiousness and his solitariness. He never smoked or drank or went to parties; and Pat approved of the absence from his life of women and all that they represented. In a way it made a barrier between them that Pat apprehended in Pearse a man in some ways rather like himself. He sensed in him, too, a sort of generalized tenderness, a sort of sweetness, something which Pat had long ago recognized in his own bosom as an enemy and attempted to destroy. Pearse was not the iron man who could have made of Pat a slavish tool. But Pat was prepared to accept him as his remote leader, and although Pearse was not officially the head of the Volunteers Pat regarded him as his chief. More near at hand he could perhaps not have brooked him. Pat detested his work in the solicitor’s office and it had once been suggested by some friends that he might apply for a post as a teacher at St Enda’s, the school of which Pearse was headmaster. Pat liked boys and he admired what he knew of St Enda’s, but he could not have had, at such close quarters, Pearse in authority over him. Pat was glad too that circumstances had not taken his brother Cathal to St Enda’s. He would not have wished Pearse to be Cathal’s teacher.
Pat had little use for women. He connected them with the part of himself which disgusted him. He found them somehow muddled and unclean, representative of the frailty and incompleteness of human life. He despised the stupidity and frivolity which characterized their talk, and he was positively nervous of being touched by one. He did not, in fact, like being touched by anybody. The human touch reminded him of a fact which he preferred to forget, that he was incarnate. The desires, the disturbances, consequent upon being a sexual being he either suffered with a bitter consciousness or else disposed of by his own means, despising himself for this servitude. In a spirit of pure enquiry, or perhaps to kill within himself a troublesome demon of curiosity, he had made his explorations in the world, both lurid and pathetic, of the Dublin prostitutes. He had discovered there exactly what he sought and took the filth of the sport into which he was initiated as a symbol of what he had in his more respectable surroundings already divined. He avoided married people.
His experience with the prostitutes had been in some ways his most momentous experience so far. It was something to which he had had to bring himself with violence. What seemed the greater part of him had felt such extreme nausea at the mere proximity of these grotesque animals: to force himself to seek their company and actually to embrace their atrocious bodies had been both a supreme degradation and a triumph of pure will. These two conceptions remained for Pat very close together. There was a satisfaction and a certainty in forcing himself to go down to the very bottom, to feel as it were the absolute floor of the world and know there was nothing under it.
Of the regions above him he did not very well know how to think. The pure perfection which he somehow knew about and from which he derived his steel-hard absolutes, his sense of justice, his love of Ireland, remained itself veiled and beyond experience. He did not call it God, nor did he connect it with the simplicities of his Catholic practice. He did not, as it were, even trouble to doubt his religion, but took from it quietly only those disciplines which suited his temperament. What served Pat, perhaps exclusively, as spiritual experience was the ripping apart of his will from the rest of his being. When he had been a boy he had pictured himself as a monk in one of the more ferociously austere religious orders, envisaging this as a supreme triumph of the will: the will riding alone, naked, over the trembling mediocre human desires. Pat had long ceased to dream of the cloister and he did not any more visit the dark doorways off the Dublin quays, but he found in a systematic thwarting of the flesh a partial remedy for the self-loathing which came over him so often. On manoeuvres with the Volunteers in the mountains he would set himself almost impossible physical endurance tests. He avoided a
ll regularity in his eating and sleeping, and would, in the midst of his most ordinary working days, harden himself with hunger and fatigue. He would have welcomed a military discipline more ruthless than anything he had yet encountered: he would gladly have accepted, and also inflicted, corporal punishment. It would have pleased him to have his flesh beside him, like a beaten subject animal, entirely cowed by his will.
Yet physical suffering was merely the symbol of what he wanted. If he could have believed himself a poet, a creator of any kind, capable of lifting out of the muck and mess of life some self-contained perfect object, this would have seemed to him a goal worthy of his powers. But he knew, bitterly, that this salvation was not given to him. He could put no name to what he wanted: it was certainly not love. There was in his life only one piece or fragment or strand of ordinary human love, one place where he needed and was needed, and he regarded this, and his inability to erase it, with the utmost dismay. His aim was something very much more like freedom. He despised the ordinary imperfect mechanics of the human personality, wherein the command of the pure Mentor was never obeyed until the impure mass of tissue, the gross living Self, was ready to obey it with ease. The Mentor’s command would be only half listened to, half heard, and the gross Self might then slowly, lazily, begin to adjust. This could be suffering, but mild, confused, scarcely conscious, dim. There would be no direct relation between the Mentor and the Self until the moment of easy obedience was reached, and the two could be related emotionally, indulgently, in the making intelligible of an act of coercion now almost completed. This method of operation enabled the gross Self to remain fat and healthy however often it might be forced to change direction. Whereas, so it seemed to Pat, in perfect life the command would be obeyed immediately, and the Mentor would not be a consoling though reproachful friend, but would be more like an executioner, bringing about a real loss of tissue in the Self and causing extreme pain.