by Iris Murdoch
‘And a very great multitude spread their garments in the way: others cut down branches from the trees and strewed them in the way. And the multitudes that went before and that followed cried saying, Hosannah to the Son of David: Blessed is he that cometh in the name of the Lord; Hosannah in the highest. And when He was come into Jerusalem, all the city was moved, saying Who is this?’ Who indeed? Barney felt that if he could really believe, even for a moment, in redemption by love he would be instantly, automatically redeemed. He dreamed of being punished and then restored to the flock: when even punishment would fade within that love and be transformed, becoming the spectacle itself of the suffering induced in a pure being by the existence of evil. But for all his cries of Kyrie eleison the faith eluded him that would have made him whole. His self-abasement provided a not wholly disagreeable emotional occupation; and not only was there no large change, there was not even the smallest, most momentary change in the pattern of life which he deplored. He was inside, indeed he was, the machine.
Tears started into Barney’s eyes. He had been drinking that afternoon with some friendly bona fides in the Big Tree in Dorset Street. Just lately he had noticed that he was never entirely sober. Tracts of time were blotted out and he was not always sure where the line came between what he had imagined and what was real, what he had intended and what he had done. He recalled with pain the scene of that morning when Millie had abused him in front of his stepson. Unfortunately, that was no dream. He had been cuffed and sent about his business. He felt a physical pain to think that Pat had witnessed this. Barney loved his stepchildren, though feeling rather in awe of both of them. He knew they could not respect him; but it seemed so very sad that therefore his love for them must be wasted and nullified. He had made one effort to draw closer to Pat by joining up with the Volunteers in the early days, and this had gained him one moment of pure pleasure, when Pat had made the discovery that Barney was a good shot. Barney had been moved too by a vague notion that he was going to strike a blow against social injustice. He had long had fantasies of himself as a slum priest defending the poor against the rich. He now proposed to divert his attention from his own sufferings to the sufferings of humanity. But humanity proved too elusive an object and the Volunteers like everything else turned out not to be the answer.
As Barney mused painfully upon his humiliation of that morning he was walking down the hill from the tram in Kingstown, down past the People’s Park, over the mysterious cleft of the railway, towards the sea. Praise be to God it wasn’t raining, for it was his day for Frances. Every Tuesday Barney met Frances in the afternoon and they walked down the pier and then had tea at O’Halloran’s Bun Shop. Barney looked forward to this time: it was a time of innocence. Barney had a happy relationship with Frances, his only relationship which was not now in some way soured and twisted. Frances was the only person who had always simply loved him. He had known her since she was a child and had got to know her well since her move to Sandycove. He was aware that, for Frances too, he had the fascinating role of a sinner. His religion also fascinated her; and for her he could somehow wear all the complicated tragic finery of his story, although of course she knew none of the details. She sensed the wreckage within and felt compassion, although there was also something of the self-conscious stooping of the pure young girl toward the fallen man. Frances knew nothing of his relations with Millie, though she had heard the rumour that ‘some woman’ had got him slung out of Maynooth. She was very curious about his past and often tried to draw him on to talk about it. Barney had amused himself by hinting at a liaison with a notable prostitute. Keeping it up, he gave Frances to understand that he had once been a great frequenter of Dublin’s brothels. This idea, which seemed to Barney to have a sort of symbolic truth, gave a certain thrill both to him and to the girl.
Barney had known from long ago, as everybody had, that Frances was destined to marry his nephew Andrew. He used to feel pleased about this as it represented an inclusion of Frances more closely in the family. But now that the time for the marriage had drawn so very near he had other feelings. He guessed that Andrew intended to take Frances to England. There Barney could not go. He too much needed, not only to see Millie, but also almost superstitiously in the intervals of seeing her, to watch her. Now the withdrawal of Frances seemed suddenly to abandon him to the devices of nightmare. Frances had been a source of light. There was also, Barney was surprised to find, an element of pure jealousy in his attitude to this marriage. He was fond of his nephew, but he simply did not want him to have Frances. This was an absurd thought, from which Barney rapidly switched to edifying pictures of dear old Uncle Barnabas, grown curiously ancient and sagelike, dandling little children upon his knee. This sometimes worked. But he was now very unhappy about Frances.
It was a windy day. The wind pursued spherical golden and black cloudlets through a yellowish sky over Kingstown and out towards the soft hazy bands of more slowly shifting sea-cloud which always lay upon the horizon like a distant range of hills. The sea would be rough. Barney could see it ahead of him now, a cold and scaly green with flecks of white. He reached the bottom of the hill and entered the gloomy patch of vegetation known as the Crocks’ Garden. This consisted of paths of blackish earth which trailed about between the thick clumps of veronica bushes which clothed the slope down to the sea: a sad place which had seemed a labyrinth of mystery to him when he had been young. Below it the waves roared on to a little muddy beach of green untidy stones and foamed along a broken breakwater which had seemed to the youthful Barney like some piece of Roman antiquity. Beyond, like a strange yellow coastline, stretched the great rocky arm of the pier, on this side of which, hollow and majestic as Egyptian temples to the eyes of the child, rose two stone shelters wherein he had spent many happy hours of his holidays watching the rain falling interminably into the sea.
Barney now took the way past the shelters before climbing up on to the top of the pier where he was to meet Frances. The shelters, whose speckled stony concrete looked like living rock, had been decorated, as usual, by small posters which the Royal Irish Constabulary had not yet had time to remove. England’s Last Ditch. Pretence of the Realm Act. Fight for Catholic Ireland not for Catholic Belgium. Barney passed by and climbed up to the top where he could pass through the thick wall to the harbour side of the pier. He looked back for a moment as a touch of sun illumined the multicoloured stucco fronts of the marine terraces, and behind them the two tall rival spires of Kingstown, Catholic and Protestant, shifting constantly in their relation to each other except when from the Martello tower at Sandycove they could be seen superimposed.
The pier itself, upon which he now set foot, had always seemed to Barney an object ancient and numinous, like some old terraced Ziggurat, composed of immense rocks of yellow granite and scarcely raised by human labour: something ‘built by the hands of giants for god-like kings of old’. Its two great arms, ending in lighthouse fortresses, enclosed a vast space of gently rolling indigo water and a miscellany of craft riding at anchor. The inner side of the pier was terraced and decorated at intervals by strange stone edifices, wind towers and obelisks and great cubes with doors, which made it seem all the more like some pagan religious monument. Beyond were the waters of Dublin Bay, now a harsh streaky blue, the outskirts of Dublin to the left, a purplish mass in the uncertain light, the dark low line of Clontarf and the rising hump of Howth. Barney noticed uneasily that it appeared to be raining on Howth. But then it was always raining on Howth.
And there was the dear girl herself down below, waving and hurrying on towards him.
‘Are you all right, Barney?’
‘Oh, all right, struggling along. A bit battered, you know, a bit battered. But struggling along.’
Frances always asked this question and Barney always gave this sort of answer. That anxious ‘Are you all right?’ of Frances was perhaps the nearest he ever got to a token of the love for which his heart craved.
Frances was wearing a mackintosh cape and mo
toring hood, and a tartan pleated skirt which swirled about her ankles. She took a firm grip upon the skirt as she walked, gathering several of the pleats carefully between her fingers. They set off along the pier in silence, mounting again to the upper terrace where a gleam of sunshine made the powerful stones a chilly sandy gold. They did not always talk then. The wind often made talking impossible.
‘What’s that, Frances?’
‘I just said there’s the mail boat.’
‘Why, so it is.’
‘How very clear and bright its colours are in the sun though it’s still so far away. Which one is it?’
‘The Hibernia.’ From long experience Barney could tell the almost identical boats apart. He hardly knew how he did it. He added. ‘She’s late. There must have been a U-boat alert.’
‘How awfully frightened they must be.’
‘You mean the passengers—’
‘No, the Germans down in the U-boats. It must be terrible.’
It had never occurred to Barney to feel sorry for the Germans down in the U-boats. But of course Frances was right, it must be terrible. His thoughts reverted to himself. With a perverse desire to cause himself pain he said to Frances, ‘You’ll be off on the mail boat one of these days.’
‘What?’
‘I said you’ll be off on the mail boat one of these days.’
‘Why?’
‘I mean, young Andrew will take you; I mean, when you’re married.’
Frances was silent.
‘When will you be married?’ said Barney. He had put off asking Frances this question, he did not want to know, it would be horrible to know.
‘I’m not sure, Barney, Andrew hasn’t actually fixed anything yet, and until—’
‘Oh well, he’ll fix it soon. He’ll have to before he— He’s a lucky boy.’ Some people have all the luck, Barney thought. Why had he not grown up with a dear lovely girl just holding out her arms and waiting for him?
Frances thrust her arm through Barney’s and they forged ahead together against the wind. ‘Well, even then you know, I probably wouldn’t leave Ireland—’
‘Yes, you would. You know Andrew hates Ireland.’
She squeezed his arm in comfort or protest and they went on for a while in silence. When they got as far as one of the ‘temples’, a square stone hut with a pediment, surmounted by three iron cups which whirled chasing each other with desperate speed, they stopped for a moment to give their whipped glowing faces a rest from the wind, and leaned back against the great wall of the pier. The sun had gone in now and the landward clouds had turned to a bright pewter grey. The spires of Kingstown rose blackened as if dipped into some infusion of darkness, but a mysterious glow lit the terraces of houses and reflected light gleamed in the windows. Beyond, the mountains were almost black save where the sun fell very far away upon a slope of rusty green. Barney began to try to light his pipe.
‘Are you still in the Volunteers, Barney?’
‘I suppose so. I haven’t actually resigned. But I’ve rather fallen out of things lately.’
Frances was silent for a while, looking towards Kingstown. The spire of the Mariners’ Church emerged from its veil of darkness and shone a silvery grey.
She said suddenly, ‘I can’t think why it doesn’t all blow up.’
‘What?’
‘Oh, I don’t know—I mean society, everything. Why do the poor people put up with us? Why do the men go and fight in that stupid ghastly war? Why don’t they all say, no, no, no?’
‘I agree with you, Frances. It’s extraordinary what people will put up with. But they just feel helpless. What can they do? What can any of us do?’
‘People shouldn’t feel helpless. Something ought to be done. I saw today by Stephen’s Green—I was in town this morning —oh, it was so sad—a girl, a mother, she must have been my age, with clothes, well they weren’t clothes, just jumbled bits of stuff, and four little children, all of them barefoot, and she was begging, and the little kids were sort of dressed up like little monkeys, and trying to dance, and they were crying all the time—’
‘I expect they were hungry.’
‘Well, it’s scandalous, wicked, and a society which allows it deserves to be blown to bits.’
‘But dearest Frances, you must have seen girls like that girl a hundred times. Dublin is full of them.’
‘Yes, I know, and that’s awful. One gets used to it. I’ve just been thinking more about it lately. It shouldn’t be. And I can’t think why they don’t attack us, jump on us like wild animals, instead of just humbly holding out their hands for a penny.’
Barney agreed with her that it shouldn’t be. But after all what could one do? The begging mother, the starving children, the men in the trenches, the Germans down in the U-boats. It was mad and a tragic world. Now if he had been a priest—
‘Barney, do you think there’ll be any trouble in Ireland?’
‘You mean fighting here?’
‘Yes, about Home Rule and so on.’
‘No, of course not. Home Rule will come automatically after the war.’
‘So there’s nothing to fight about, is there?’
‘Nothing at all.’
‘And any way, Father was saying they have no arms. They can’t fight.’
‘No, they can’t.’
‘Barney, what will Home Rule do for that woman begging in the street?’
Barney thought for a moment. ‘Absolutely nothing.’
‘It won’t really touch that level of people at all?’
‘Well, they’ll have the pleasure of being exploited by P. Flanagan instead of J. Smith.’
‘Then the thing’s not worth fighting for anyway.’
‘Wait a minute. It’s worth having one’s national freedom,’ said Barney. He felt a bit vague about it. ‘Once Ireland’s free of England it’ll be easier to set the house in order.’
‘I don’t see why. Some people say there ought to be a rising against the whole thing, against the English and against the Irish employers too. James Connolly says that, doesn’t he?’
‘Yes, but it’s all dreams, Frances. They couldn’t do it. And it would be just a very nasty mess if they tried. Those people don’t know how to run the country.’
‘Do the people who let that woman beg and her children starve know how to run the country?’
‘Well, I see what you mean. But law and order are important too. The workers should stick to the Trade Unions, that’s how they’ll better themselves.’
‘But the government and the employers won’t allow the Trade Unions.’
‘They will, they’ll have to. You’re getting quite a political woman these days, Frances. We’ll see you in uniform next!’
‘I ought to be in uniform. But I don’t know which one to wear!’ She spoke bitterly, striking the palms of her hands against the damp stone behind her. The wind had spread the tartan skirt and flattened it against the wall. She added, ‘Oh, I don’t know what I’m talking about. How I wish I’d had some proper education. I’m so muddled. Perhaps women really can’t understand politics. It can’t be right to shed blood for anything. I do think this dreadful war against Germany is so wrong. All those terrible things in the trenches and the shell fire. There must be some way of stopping it. The soldiers should all just throw down their arms.’
‘Come, come. You wouldn’t like to see Andrew being a conchie!’
‘If Andrew became a conchie I’d fall down and worship him.’
As Barney turned in some surprise to look at her she jerked from him impatiently saying, ‘Let’s go through and look at the rocks.’
This was something they always did. On the inside of the pier were the great terraces and the temples. On the outside, where the open sea beat against it, was a mountainside of immense jagged rocks heaped together. Periodic gaps in the upper wail allowed one to pass through to this side. Barney and Frances went through and stood looking down.
The blows and caresses of the sea had made n
o impression upon the shape of the rocks or even upon their colour. They remained senselessly jagged and yellow, a random pile of unalterable many-surfaced solids. Here and there a huge stone, balanced between two neighbours, would tilt to and fro at the touch of the waves. In other places the rocks seemed more closely fused as if some semi-intelligent hand had wedged them together. But mostly they lay like things tossed down, one idly resting upon another. And between them were great holes and crevasses, ugly slits and irregular gashes, within which the sea would roar or come suddenly surging upward to boil out over the indifferent granite surfaces. Barney had always felt frightened of these rocks, even when as a boy he had leapt familiarly from one to another. He feared the deep crevasses down which a man might slide into some awful sea cavern. More perhaps he feared the huge weight, the appalling hardness, the senselessness of them. They were like the great weighty stupid world which had rolled off the lap of God. They were the most meaningless things that he knew, as meaningless as death.